On Sat, Feb 28, 2015 at 07:06:16PM -0800, Junio C Hamano wrote: > Trevor Saunders <tbsaunde@xxxxxxxxxxxx> writes: > > > There have been cases where I wanted grep to always ignore certain > > files, but to still get text diffs for those files. One case is people > > insist on using ChangeLog files, and another is people who commit > > generated files of one sort or another. > > The attributes are to say "the contents to be stored in this file is > of this nature". Something inherent to the type of the contents, > and that is why there is no way to countermand them from the command > line. > > The "nature of the content" may be "result of comparing two versions > of them textually will never make sense to humans", or "result of > finding substrings in them will never make sense to humans", which > are what "-diff" and hypothetical "-grep" mean, respectively. > > "It is inconvenient that I see hits in ChangeLog files when I look > for string BUG" does not make ChangeLog inherently "result of > finding substrings in it never makes sense to humans"-kind of file > type. Maybe somebody who is playing a role of a coder right now may > not look at existing ChangeLog entries, but when that same person > plays the role of a release manager next day, running grep on older > ChangeLog files may become necessary to find changes related to > recent changes. For these "per-invocation" differences, attributes > to declare permenent/inherent nature of the contents is much less > suited than per-invocation inclusion/exclusion mechanism based on > pathspecs, I would think. I think that makes some amount of sense, however typing stuff like --exclude=ChangeLog all the time is not terribly easy on the hands. Would it make sense to instead add a config variable grep.exclude? Trev > > -- 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