Re: [PROPOSAL] .gitignore syntax modification

[Kevin Ballard <kevin@sb.org>]

On Oct 8, 2010, at 2:58 PM, Maaartin wrote:

> You don't. You can do something like
> 
> *.xcodeproj/*
> !.xcodeproj/subdir_with_project
> .xcodeproj/subdir_with_project/*
> !.xcodeproj/subdir_with_project/*.pbxproj
> 
> I'm a beginner but I just stumbled upon this very problem five minutes ago.

That's not the right layout. I'd have to do

*.xcodeproj/*
!*.xcodeproj/project.pbxproj
*/*.xcodeproj/*
!*/*.xcodeproj/project.pbxproj

And so on, once for each possible level of nesting.

> The reason for git ignoring everything in the directory without ever looking 
> there is efficiency.

That's not what's happening either. That happens if you ignore the directory itself, such as

*.xcodeproj/

That won't look in the directory at all to match non-ignore patterns. The problem I'm talking about is simply that you cannot write a pattern that includes a slash and have that pattern match at any nesting level.

Upon further reflection, if we stick with platform-provided fnmatch() we don't have to special-case a prefixed **/. We could simply define patterns as always matching in that way, and you can use the already-existing prefixed / to root it at the current level. So if my pattern looks like

*.xcodeproj/*

Then it will attempt to match this pattern against the last 2 path components of any path rooted in this directory. It can simply count the slashes to determine the number of path components. If I really want it to just match *.xcodeproj files in the current directory then my pattern should look like

/*.xcodeproj/*

-Kevin Ballard