Junio C Hamano <gitster@xxxxxxxxx> writes:
> Thomas Rast <trast@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
>
>> 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.
>
> Fixing the working tree is easy, but when we read from a history
> that already records such an entry in an attribute file, it would
> become somewhat cumbersome. I wouldn't use "very hard to fix" to
> describe such a case.
Well, I'm sorry if I hurt any feelings there, but...
~/tmp/badattr(master)$ git show bad:.gitattributes
!bad text
~/tmp/badattr(master)$ ~/g/git-checkout bad # a git without my patch
fatal: Negative patterns are forbidden in git attributes
Use '\!' for literal leading exclamation.
~/tmp/badattr(master)$ git status
# On branch master
nothing to commit (use -u to show untracked files)
Notice how it remains on master. I suppose with enough knowledge of the
internals I could manage, but after seeing how hard it was to *build*
such broken history with a git that dies, I don't really want to try.
--
Thomas Rast
trast@{inf,student}.ethz.ch
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