Re: ignoring files/directories in git

[Andreas Ericsson <ae@op5.se>]

Boaz Harrosh wrote:
> Dmitry Potapov wrote:
>> On Mon, Sep 22, 2008 at 10:37:00AM +0300, Boaz Harrosh wrote:
>>> I have 1.6.0.1 I compiled here, and it has the same problem. So it is
>>> a very recent fix
>> I certainly tested 1.6.0.1 and does not have this problem, and it was
>> fixed a long time ago:
>>
>> ===
>> commit d6b8fc303b389b026f2bf9918f6f83041488989b
>> Author: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
>> Date:   Thu Jan 31 01:17:48 2008 -0800
>>
>>     gitignore(5): Allow "foo/" in ignore list to match directory "foo"
>>
>>     A pattern "foo/" in the exclude list did not match directory
>>     "foo", but a pattern "foo" did.  This attempts to extend the
>>     exclude mechanism so that it would while not matching a regular
>>     file or a symbolic link "foo".  In order to differentiate a
>>     directory and non directory, this passes down the type of path
>>     being checked to excluded() function.
>>
>>     A downside is that the recursive directory walk may need to run
>>     lstat(2) more often on systems whose "struct dirent" do not give
>>     the type of the entry; earlier it did not have to do so for an
>>     excluded path, but we now need to figure out if a path is a
>>     directory before deciding to exclude it.  This is especially bad
>>     because an idea similar to the earlier CE_UPTODATE optimization
>>     to reduce number of lstat(2) calls would by definition not apply
>>     to the codepaths involved, as (1) directories will not be
>>     registered in the index, and (2) excluded paths will not be in
>>     the index anyway.
>> ===
>>
>> The patch is included in 1.5.5.
>>
>> Dmitry
>> --
> 
> Ok I found it. Regular subdirectories it works as you said,
> but soft-link to a folder does not. Sorry for the noise i didn't
> realize that in my test it was a simlink and not a full directory.
> 
> Please don't fix it if it will hurt performance, I'm happy with
> current solution as it is. Just maybe a small addition to the
> .gitignore documentation perhaps.
> 

It wouldn't hurt performance (noticeably) to change the lstat()
call to a stat() call. It's slightly more work for the kernel,
but assuming you don't have tens of thousands of symlinks it
really won't make a difference. I'm not sure what other things
would break from using stat() instead of lstat() in the exclude
matching code though, so it's not so simple as just replacing
it.

-- 
Andreas Ericsson                   andreas.ericsson@op5.se
OP5 AB                             www.op5.se
Tel: +46 8-230225                  Fax: +46 8-230231