Re: [PATCH] gitignore: Move ignores from global to subdirectories

[Jan Beulich <jbeulich@xxxxxxxx>]

On 31.08.2020 08:37, Elliott Mitchell wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 28, 2020 at 09:24:41AM +0200, Jan Beulich wrote:
>> On 28.08.2020 04:57, Elliott Mitchell wrote:
>>> Subdirectories which have .gitignore files should not be referenced in
>>> the global .gitignore files.  Move several lines to appropriate subdirs.
>>>
>>> Signed-off-by: Elliott Mitchell <ehem+xen@xxxxxxx>
>>>
>>> ---
>>> Hopefully the commit message covers it.  When moved to the subdirectories
>>> I'm using "./<file>" as otherwise any file sharing the name in a deeper
>>> subdirectory would be subject to the match.
>>
>> May I ask why this last sentence isn't part of the commit message?
> 
> My thinking is it was pretty straightforward to figure out when looking.
> Not /quite/ obvious enough to avoid commenting in e-mail, but not quite
> obscure enough to have in commit message.  This can go either way really.

Your statements below really look to me as if this wasn't this obvious
at all - ...

> The .gitignore files aren't very consistent.  I'm unsure whether it is
> worth going after the inconsistencies, but it is certainly there.
> 
> Before this I noticed xen/xsm/flask/.gitignore had "/policy.c", which
> overlapped with "xen/xsm/flask/policy.*" in the top-level .gitignore.
> Checking the documentation on .gitignore files if it simply had
> "policy.c", git would have ignored any file name "policy.c" in
> subdirectories.
> 
> Is it better to prefix lines in the current directory with "./" versus
> "/"?  (I kind of like "./" since it looks like a relative path, but it
> *isn't* actually a relative path)

... you even look to suggest here that there are two alternative
forms which both have the same meaning. Personally I agree that
./ may be more "natural" to use than /, but the question then is
what the conventions are. I can't answer this.

> Should files in subdirectories also include "./"?

If "no prefix at all" includes, as you say, also files in subdirs,
then the answer probably is "depends".

> Preferences in sorting?

Alphabetical sorting is what we generally aim for here.

Jan