Before 82dce99 (attr: more matching optimizations from .gitignore, 2012-10-15), .gitattributes did not have any special treatment of a leading '!'. The docs, however, always said The rules how the pattern matches paths are the same as in `.gitignore` files; see linkgit:gitignore[5]. By those rules, leading '!' means pattern negation. So 82dce99 correctly determined that this kind of line makes no sense and should be disallowed. However, users who actually had a rule for files starting with a '!' are in a bad position: before 82dce99 '!' matched that literal character, so it is conceivable that users have .gitattributes with such lines in them. After 82dce99 the unescaped version was disallowed in such a way that git outright refuses to run(!) most commands in the presence of such a .gitattributes. It therefore becomes very hard to fix, let alone work with, such repositories. Let's at least allow the users to fix their repos: change the fatal error into a warning. Reported-by: mathstuf@xxxxxxxxx Signed-off-by: Thomas Rast <trast@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> --- attr.c | 8 +++++--- t/t0003-attributes.sh | 3 ++- 2 files changed, 7 insertions(+), 4 deletions(-) diff --git a/attr.c b/attr.c index 4657cc2..e2f9377 100644 --- a/attr.c +++ b/attr.c @@ -255,9 +255,11 @@ static struct match_attr *parse_attr_line(const char *line, const char *src, &res->u.pat.patternlen, &res->u.pat.flags, &res->u.pat.nowildcardlen); - if (res->u.pat.flags & EXC_FLAG_NEGATIVE) - die(_("Negative patterns are forbidden in git attributes\n" - "Use '\\!' for literal leading exclamation.")); + if (res->u.pat.flags & EXC_FLAG_NEGATIVE) { + warning(_("Negative patterns are ignored in git attributes\n" + "Use '\\!' for literal leading exclamation.")); + return NULL; + } } res->is_macro = is_macro; res->num_attr = num_attr; diff --git a/t/t0003-attributes.sh b/t/t0003-attributes.sh index 43b2513..0b98b6f 100755 --- a/t/t0003-attributes.sh +++ b/t/t0003-attributes.sh @@ -198,7 +198,8 @@ test_expect_success 'root subdir attribute test' ' test_expect_success 'negative patterns' ' echo "!f test=bar" >.gitattributes && - test_must_fail git check-attr test -- f + git check-attr test -- '"'"'!f'"'"' 2>errors && + test_i18ngrep "Negative patterns are ignored" errors ' test_expect_success 'patterns starting with exclamation' ' -- 1.8.2.rc1.392.gf57d6b8.dirty -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html