Re: [PROPOSAL] .gitignore syntax modification

[Maaartin <grajcar1@seznam.cz>]

Kevin Ballard <kevin <at> sb.org> writes:

> ... Similarly, for foo.xcodeproj packages I
> like to ignore all contained files except project.pbxproj. 
Unfortunately, .gitignore has no good way of
> matching this sort of thing at anything other than the root level. Here's an 
example of my global
> ~/.gitignore file:
> 
> *.xcodeproj/*
> !*.xcodeproj/*.pbxproj
> 
> ... On any repository where this isn't the case, I have to duplicate this 
pattern into
> a .gitignore file at the right level.

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.

The reason for git ignoring everything in the directory without ever looking 
there is efficiency. Maybe we would need something like "weak ignore" meaning 
ignore all matching files but traverse the directories. I'd propose the syntax

?*.xcodeproj
!*.pbxproj

for this. The pattern after the question would exclude all files below 
*.xcodeproj but still traverse the directories there. The second pattern would 
re-include the *.pbxproj files.

The lower efficiency would be no problem, since this was user's choice not to 
use the standard pattern. You could still prevent digging too deep by using 
additionally something like

*.xcodeproj/*/*