git ignoring .gitattributes pattern

Question

I\'ve a directory structure like this:

root/
  .git
  deploy/
  Site/
    blah/
    more_blah/
      something.local
      else.development
    Rakefile
             


        

Answer 1

With git version 1.7.2.5, which is the default on debian squeeze (hence this post), there must not be a slash at the end to ignore a directory. So in order to ignore the deploy dir in the above question the following line must be used (no slash):

deploy        export-ignore

This is in contradiction to the documentation (man gitattributes / man gitignore) and the git book. The documentation of gitattributes references gitignore. Interestingly dirs with a slash (deploy/) work in a .gitignore file.

I did not test later versions of git.