On Mon, Mar 19, 2018 at 11:10:26PM -0400, Dakota Hawkins wrote: > > As you noted below, that second line does not match your path, because > > attributes on a directory aren't applied recursively. And it has nothing > > to do with overriding. If you remove the png line entirely, you can see > > that we still do not match it. You need to use "*" to match the paths. > > Ah, yes, I see that. Inconsistent with .gitignore (more below), right? Yes, it is. > > I could not find anything useful in gitattributes(5). There's some old > > discussion here: > > > > https://public-inbox.org/git/slrnkldd3g.1l4.jan@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx/ > > If I follow that correctly: There's some initial speculation that it > would be OK to apply the attributes recursively, which is then shot > down because it wasn't designed to be recursive (though I don't see a > different, technical reason for that), followed by finding a (this > same?) solution/workaround for the original problem. Is that about > right? Right. The technical reason is mostly "that is not how it was designed, and it would possibly break some corner cases if we switched it now". > > I think just "/.readme-docs/**" should be sufficient for your case. You > > could also probably write "*" inside ".readme-docs/.gitattributes", > > which may be simpler (you don't need "**" there because patterns without > > a slash are just matched directly against the basename). > > Wouldn't that make the "*" inside ".readme-docs/.gitattributes", > technically recursive when "*" matches a directory? Sort of. The pattern is applied recursively to each basename, but the pattern itself does not match recursively. That's probably splitting hairs, though. :) > It's always seemed to me that both were necessary to explicitly match > things in a directory and its subdirectories (example, IIRC: "git > ls-files -- .gitattributes" vs "git ls-files -- .gitattributes > **/.gitattributes"). Maybe that example is peculiar in that its a > dotfile and can't have a wildcard before the dot? Those are pathspecs, which are not quite the same as gitattributes. They don't do the magic basename matching. For pathspecs a "*" matches across slashes, which is what allows "git log -- '*.h'" to work (but not a suffix wildcard like 'foo*'). > I guess my takeaway is that it would be _good_ if the gitattributes > documentation contained the caveat about not matching directories > recursively, but _great_ if gitattributes and gitignore (and whatever > else there is) were consistent. I agree it would be nice if they were consistent (and pathspecs, too). But unfortunately at this point there's a maze of backwards compatibility to deal with. -Peff
