Re: Fwd: Unexpected behavior of ls-files command when using --others --exclude-from, and a .gitignore file which resides in a subdirectory

[Jeff King <peff@peff.net>]

On Mon, Jan 22, 2024 at 09:45:46PM +0100, Raúl Núñez de Arenas Coronado wrote:

> But when using 'git ls-files --others --exclude-from=<file>', when
> <file> is one of those .gitignore files present in a subdir, makes the
> command use the patterns in that .gitgnore (in this case, the "*")
> against ALL files that would otherwise be listed by using '--others'.
>
> In short: using 'git ls-files --others
> --exclude-from=subdir/.gitignore' results in an empty listing if
> subdir/.gitignore contains '*". IMHO that pattern should be applied to
> the subdir contents and not to the contents of the current directory.
> That would be consistent with how git uses .gitignore files in
> subfolders.

I think Junio covered this with his example, and everything is behaving
as intended (my mental model is that "--exclude-from" is something like
.git/info/exclude or the core.excludesFile option).

But...

> The obvious solution is to use --exclude-per-directory but it is
> deprecated in favor of --exclude-standard and --exclude-standard shows
> the same behaviour of --exclude-from=subdir/.gitignore!!!

...I'm not sure what's going on here. I would think that both
--exclude-standard and --exclude-per-directory would do what you want.

For example, I get:

  [setup]
  $ git init
  $ mkdir subdir
  $ echo '*' >subdir/.gitignore
  $ git add -f subdir/.gitignore && git commit -m "add gitignore"
  $ touch subdir/file file

  [no exclusions]
  $ git ls-files -o
  file
  subdir/file

  [use .gitignore]
  $ git ls-files --exclude-per-directory=.gitignore -o
  file

  [using standard excludes]
  $ git ls-files --exclude-standard -o
  file

Do you get different results from that toy repo? If not, then what is
different about your main repo? Do you perhaps have a stray "*" match
somewhere in .git/info/exclude, etc? Or are you still providing
--exclude-from in addition to --exclude-standard?

-Peff

PS I hadn't realized that --exclude-per-directory had been marked as
   deprecated. I do agree with e750951e74 (ls-files: guide folks to
   --exclude-standard over other --exclude* options, 2023-01-13) in its
   goal of guiding people to the easiest option, but I don't know that
   there has been any discussion about removing the other ones.