Ignore rules & paths

Canonical paths

A path is UTF-8, /-separated, relative, with no empty, ., or .. components, at most 8192 bytes, components at most 255 bytes. Rejected on every platform at add and submit time: backslashes, control characters, < > : " | ? *, reserved device names (CON, PRN, AUX, NUL, COM1-COM9, LPT1-LPT9, with or without extension), components ending in a dot or space, and anything under .scribe/. Symbolic links, junctions, and reparse points are never followed, added, or synced through; they are reported.

Case and normalization collisions: the server keeps a current_fold index of NFC-normalized, Unicode-lowercased paths per branch and rejects a submission that would create two paths mapping to the same key (path_collision), including within one submission. Windows/NTFS and macOS/APFS would otherwise map them to one file. Matching of ignore rules is case-sensitive on every platform.

Long paths: Windows paths over 240 characters are opened with the \\?\ extended-length prefix. A 4,000-character path is tested on Linux and Windows (platform_behaviour.rs); macOS caps most syscalls at 1,024 bytes and is not tested for long paths.

Executable bits are stored in file records; applied on Unix, stored only on Windows.

Ignore files

Syntax: Git-style via the ignore crate's matcher, with comments, blank lines, \# and \! escapes, *, ?, character classes, **, trailing-slash directory patterns, leading-slash anchoring to the rule file's directory, negation, UTF-8, spaces, LF or CRLF, trailing-space escaping. Unclosed character classes are literal (as in Git). A malformed rule (for example an invalid range) is reported, and commands that discover files refuse to proceed rather than treating the file as empty.
Sources and precedence, lowest to highest: --global-ignore <file>; workspace-local .scribe/ignore; versioned .scribeignore files from the root to the deepest applicable directory. Within one file the last matching rule wins. Deeper versioned files override shallower ones.
Excluded parents: an ignored directory is not traversed, so a negation in a deeper file cannot recover its contents. scribe ignore explain reports via_parent in that case.
Ignore rules affect only untracked discovery and recursive add. Tracked files are always scanned; scribe status --scan reports modifications and deletions of tracked files regardless of rules. Rules never delete data and are not access control. Versioned ignore files are ordinary tracked files.
No .gitignore, no global Git configuration, no hidden-file policy, no engine templates are read.
scribe add --force <path> overrides ignore matching only; it never overrides containment, .scribe/, links, or name validity.
scribe ignore explain <path> prints ignored/not ignored, the deciding file, line, and pattern, and whether a parent directory decided.

Fingerprints

The baseline records size and modification time as reported by the filesystem. Equal fingerprints skip hashing in status; status --verify hashes. Fingerprints are caches, not proof of unchanged bytes. Resolution differs by filesystem (NTFS 100 ns ticks; some filesystems 1 or 2 s), so only exact equality is meaningful.

Concurrent external writers

Submit re-stats a file after hashing it and re-hashes every chunk range while uploading, so a file that changes during a submit is refused. A before/after stat is not an atomic snapshot: a writer that modifies a file between the final stat and the upload read is caught by the chunk digest check; a writer that modifies and restores bytes within one fingerprint tick is not. Editors should be quiescent during submit.