Subject: Re: Feature Request: gitignore recursion

From: Duy Nguyen <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 7 Oct 2013 20:41:42 +0700

On Mon, Oct 07, 2013 at 07:24:11AM -0400, Jeff King wrote:
> However, one thing I expected to work but didn't is:
> 
>   echo '*' >.gitignore
>   echo '!*' >my_dir/.gitignore
> 
> That _does_ work for attributes, like:
> 
>   echo '* foo=one' >.gitattributes
>   echo '* foo=two' >my_dir/.gitattributes
> 
> where the more-specific file takes precedence. It works because we keep
> an attribute stack, and look from most-specific directory to least.
>
> ...

Yeah. I'm still bugged about that because we could at least make your
case work (deep/down/.gitignore will never ever, of course) but I
probably won't do anything about it for the next few months. So how
about this.

The first use of footnote:[] is already in git-notes.txt. The second
instance should not cause any issues with supported asciidoc versions.

-- 8< --
Subject: [PATCH] gitignore.txt: note about a behavior not so obvious much to users

Signed-off-by: Nguyễn Thái Ngọc Duy <[email-masked]>
---
 Documentation/gitignore.txt | 5 ++++-
 1 file changed, 4 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-)

diff --git a/Documentation/gitignore.txt b/Documentation/gitignore.txt
index 54e334e..cd59f6e 100644
--- a/Documentation/gitignore.txt
+++ b/Documentation/gitignore.txt
@@ -21,7 +21,10 @@ Each line in a `gitignore` file specifies a pattern.
 When deciding whether to ignore a path, Git normally checks
 `gitignore` patterns from multiple sources, with the following
 order of precedence, from highest to lowest (within one level of
-precedence, the last matching pattern decides the outcome):
+precedence, the last matching pattern decides the outcome
+footnote:[Due to optimizations Git will not look further into ignored
+directories. So if you have a rule to ignore directory `foo`,
+`.gitignore` in `foo` and its subdirectories are all ignored]):
 
  * Patterns read from the command line for those commands that support
    them.
-- 
1.8.2.83.gc99314b
-- 8< --