negated list in .gitignore no fun

[jidanni@jidanni.org]

I discovered git is so negative: it has very good .gitignore negative
matching facilities, but not as good positive matching facilities.
(Maybe positive glob lists are merely fed to git-add from the command line.)

I had dreams of tracking only a few files in a large tree.
I thought I would maintain that list as a negated list in .gitignore,
and then always use "git-add ." to keep git's index reflecting my list.

However that's just not possible.

# head -n 5 .gitignore
*
!X11/xorg.conf
!anacrontab
!apt/apt.conf.d/10jidanni
!apt/sources.list
# git-add .
But git-status only shows anacrontab got added. None of the files in
the subdirectories get added. We continue,
# sed -n s/^!//p .gitignore|xargs git-add #no help!
# sed -n s/^!//p .gitignore|xargs -n 1 git-add #Geez. Finally worked.
OK, I suppose my next step is just to rm .gitignore and just add any
future files I want to add to my list one by one with git-add... like
git was designed to do in the first place. OK, thanks. Bye.
Next episode: some kind of middle ground with etckeeper.