Re: check-attr doesn't respect recursive definitions

[Jeff King <peff@peff.net>]

On Tue, Apr 02, 2013 at 09:11:02AM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:

> Jeff King <peff@peff.net> writes:
> 
> > Yes, it is the expected behavior, though I cannot offhand think of
> > anything that would break if we did apply it recursively.
> 
> Conceptually that breaks our brain.  "All files in doc/ directories
> are text" and "doc/ directory is text" are two different things, no?

In some systems, yes, but git does not have any notion of "doc/" as an
item (after all, we track content in files, not directories), so I do
not see what it means to specify a directory except to say "everything
under it has this property".

We already treat "foo/" in gitignore this way (i.e., "everything under
foo is ignored"). And we treat export-ignore the same way in
git-archive.

I agree that saying "Documentation diff=text" is not something I would
expect people to do, but what _should_ it do? Recursively applying under
the directory seems a sane option. I would not want to paint us into a
corner, but I cannot think of any other reasonable thing to do with it
(which is why I phrased it as "I cannot think of anything that would
break", and not "this is a great idea"; counterpoints are welcome).

I am sympathetic to Jan's issue, though. If git were consistent about
applying attributes only to paths, then the repo owner would have
written "dir/* export-ignore", not "dir". But it is not, and git-archive
does ask for attributes on directories, but without providing a good
mechanism for doing those attribute lookups from external programs.

-Peff