Re: .gitattributes override behavior (possible bug, or documentation bug)

[Dakota Hawkins <dakota@dakotahawkins.com>]

One extra note:

I was burned by this just a few hours ago in a new repo (but because
of this discussion I realized what the problem was pretty quickly).

In the top-level .gitignore I had

    build/
    ...
    !alpine/build/

where `build/` was a stock ignore line among hundreds that I blindly
pasted in there, and the exclusion was an attempt to exclude some
things that shouldn't have been ignored.

Even in the same file, the exclusion doesn't work. I had to change it to:

    build/*
    ...
    !alpine/build/

Good times :)

- Dakota

On Wed, Mar 21, 2018 at 3:36 AM, Dakota Hawkins
<dakota@dakotahawkins.com> wrote:
>> I think that ignoring all of /ignore-most/ is much more efficient, since
>> we don't have to enumerate the paths inside it at all (which is why the
>> current behavior works as it does).
>
> That's definitely true, but I wonder what the impact would be for most
> cases (even for most cases with large repos and larges sets of ignore
> files).
>
> Most of my .gitignore patterns weren't hand-written
> (https://www.gitignore.io/ is pretty neat), but there are a ton of
> patterns like `dir/`...
>
> I think if I were designing it from scratch and knew what I know now
> I'd probably argue that behavior should be declarative (`dir/*
> recurse=false` or something), but we can't really get there from here.
>
> At any rate, would it at least be a good idea to make the "trailing
> slash halts recursion, won't consider nested .gitignore files"
> explicit in the `.gitignore` doc? Unless I'm missing it, I don't think
> that behavior is called out (or at least not called out concisely/in
> one place). It looks like this is all there is:
>
>     "If the pattern ends with a slash, it is removed for the purpose
> of the following description, but it would only find a match with a
> directory. In other words, foo/ will match a directory foo and paths
> underneath it, but will not match a regular file or a symbolic link
> foo (this is consistent with the way how pathspec works in general in
> Git)."
>
> Also, I'm not sure what the "following description" is in "it is
> removed for the purpose of the following description". Is that trying
> to imply "excluded from the rest of the doc"?
>
> - Dakota