request - trailing # comments are silently non-functional in .gitignore

perl is starting to use git, so Im a new user.

I wrote a script to generate .gitignore from a MANIFEST, so I used a universal ignore, followed by explicit *attends*

# ignore everything
*
# watch these files
!perl.h
...

while testing this, I discovered that trailing comments silently invalidate the rule, so this line is ineffective:

* # ignore everything. We attend to MANIFEST entries next...

Explicit MANIFEST support / file inclusion

!<MANIFEST

the above could mean dont-ignore all files named in MANIFEST (1st field: /^(\S+)/)

This describes use of other .gitignores (but Im not suggesting this be supported)

<find . -name .gitignore

However, this might be useful

!<cut -d\ -f2 MANIFEST-odd

Id accept that this might be too much shell-ish magic for your tastes,

Preprocessor Support

Perl uses XS to interface to C libs etc, and needs to process foo.xs -> foo.c which is then compiled to make foo.o. Heres an excerpt from a makefile

# --- MakeMaker xs_c section:

.xs.c:

       $(XSUBPPRUN) $(XSPROTOARG) $(XSUBPPARGS) $(XSUBPP_EXTRA_ARGS) 

$*.xs > $*.xsc && $(MV) $*.xsc $*.c

It would be nice if this kind of dependency were usable as an ignoral-directive, ignore foo.c if foo.xs exists.

some alternatives:

:*.c:*.xs:
- colons signal different kind of line, and delimit 2 specs
- the 2 * must match same literals (perhaps why make dev's left them
out)

*.c!*.xs
- here '!' serves as separator of 2 fields
- also suggests attend to the 2nd field (which is arguably desirable) if so, it needs to be attended even if *.c is missing (it is
until built)