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2026-03-28doc: gitignore: clarify pattern base for info/exclude and core.excludesFileShreyansh Paliwal
The pattern format section describes how patterns are interpreted relative to the location of a .gitignore file, but does not mention the behavior for exclude sources outside the working tree. Clarify that patterns from $GIT_DIR/info/exclude and core.excludesFile are treated as if they are specified at the root of the working tree, so a leading '/' anchors matches at the repository root. Reported-by: Dan Drake <dan@dandrake.org> Signed-off-by: Shreyansh Paliwal <shreyanshpaliwalcmsmn@gmail.com> Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
2025-10-29doc: document backslash in gitignore patternsJeff King
Because gitignore patterns are passed to fnmatch, the handling of backslashes is the same as it is there: it can be used to escape metacharacters. We do reference fnmatch(3) for more details, but it may be friendlier to point out this implication explicitly (especially for people who want to know about backslash handling and search the documentation for that word). There are also two cases that I've seen some other backslash-escaping systems handle differently, so let's describe those: 1. A backslash before any character treats that character literally, even if it's not otherwise a meta-character. As opposed to including the backslash itself (like "foo\bar" in shell expands to "foo\bar") or forbidding it ("foo\zar" is required to produce a diagnostic in C). 2. A backslash at the end of the string is an invalid pattern (and not a literal backslash). This second one in particular was a point of confusion between our implementation and the one in JGit. Our wildmatch behavior matches what POSIX specifies for fnmatch, so the code and documentation are in line. But let's add a test to cover this case. Note that the behavior here differs between wildmatch itself (which is what gitignore will use) and pathspec matching (which will only turn to wildmatch if a literal match fails). So we match "foo\" to "foo\" in pathspecs, but not via gitignore. Signed-off-by: Jeff King <peff@peff.net> Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
2025-01-21doc: use .adoc extension for AsciiDoc filesbrian m. carlson
We presently use the ".txt" extension for our AsciiDoc files. While not wrong, most editors do not associate this extension with AsciiDoc, meaning that contributors don't get automatic editor functionality that could be useful, such as syntax highlighting and prose linting. It is much more common to use the ".adoc" extension for AsciiDoc files, since this helps editors automatically detect files and also allows various forges to provide rich (HTML-like) rendering. Let's do that here, renaming all of the files and updating the includes where relevant. Adjust the various build scripts and makefiles to use the new extension as well. Note that this should not result in any user-visible changes to the documentation. Signed-off-by: brian m. carlson <sandals@crustytoothpaste.net> Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>