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

[Jeff King <peff@peff.net>]

On Tue, Mar 20, 2018 at 12:25:27AM -0400, Dakota Hawkins wrote:

> > Right. The technical reason is mostly "that is not how it was designed,
> > and it would possibly break some corner cases if we switched it now".
> 
> I'm just spitballing here, but do you guys think there's any subset of
> the combined .gitignore and .gitattributes matching functionality that
> could at least serve as a good "best-practices, going forward"
> (because of consistency) for both? I will say every time I do this for
> a new repo and have to do something even slightly complicated or
> different from what I've done before with .gitattributes/.gitignore
> that it takes me a long-ish time to figure it out. It's like I'm
> vaguely aware of pitfalls I've encountered in the past in certain
> areas but don't remember exactly what they are, so I consult the docs,
> which are (in sum) confusing and lead to more time spent
> trying/failing/trying/works/fails-later/etc.
> 
> One "this subset of rules will work for both this way" would be
> awesome even if the matching capabilities are technically divergent,
> but on the other hand that might paint both into a corner in terms of
> functionality.

As far as I know, they should be the same with the exception of this
recursion, and the negative-pattern thing. But I'm cc-ing Duy, who is
the resident expert on ignore and attributes matching (whether he wants
to be or not ;) ). I wouldn't be surprised if there's something I don't
know about.

So I think the "recommended subset" is basically "everything but these
few constructs". We just need to document them. ;)

I probably should cc'd Duy on the documentation patch, too:

  https://public-inbox.org/git/20180320041454.GA15213@sigill.intra.peff.net/

-Peff