Subject: Re: [RFD/PATCH] add: ignore only ignored files

From: Junio C Hamano <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 19 Nov 2014 13:43:52 -0800

Jeff King <[email-masked]> writes:

> Typically I keep a very neat .gitignore file and just use "git add .",
> which _does_ ignore those files. The real problem here is that git
> cannot tell the difference between "the user explicitly asked for
> foo.aux, so we should complain" and "oops, foo.aux got caught in a shell
> expansion".

Yup.  I also find myself doing "git cmd -- \*.ext" to let Git, not
my shell, handle the patterns.

> I almost wonder if skipping ignored files should _always_ be a warning,
> not a hard error. I guess that has unpleasant side effects for scripts
> which call "git add XXX" and check the exit code, who may be
> unpleasantly surprised that they missed out on some content.
>
> Perhaps we could do a hybrid: add the files that were not ignored, but
> then still exit non-zero. Careful scripts need to check the exit status
> of "git add" anyway, and sloppy humans with over-broad wildcards
> typically do not care about the exit status.

;-)