The Worktree.Status() implementation does not ignore directories that are previously excluded by another .gitignore, for example it will iterate through all node_modules in a repository, even when these node_modules are ignored in the root .gitignore.

This leads to a funny behauvior, when you define another .gitignore, in an ignored sub directory, you can include files again with the ! operator in the second git ignore, which is respected by go git, but not by git status CLI.

An example:

My root .gitignore contains the directory sub

# .gitignore
sub

While in the directory sub, we have another .gitignore, which has this content:

# sub/.gitignore
!file.txt

And we have a file.txt in the sub directory aswell:

# sub/file.txt
hello world

The implementation of go git will now show, that we have an unstaged file in sub/file.txt, while git itself does not have this behaviour when we use git status.

I created a repository to reproduce this issue with an example: https://github.com/svenliebig/gogit-status-problem-example

git clone https://github.com/svenliebig/gogit-status-problem-example.git
cd gogit-status-problem-example
git status
go run main.go

You'll see that both implementation return that no changes are made.

Let's run scripts.sh, this will create a file.txt in the directory sub, and add the directory to the .gitignore in the root.

./scripts.sh
git status
go run main.go

git status now shows that we have a change in .gitignore, while the implementation of go-git also shows the file.txt in their status implementation.

This behaviour is produced in this dir.go file, where we iterate over all directories regardless if they where previously ignored or not.