Linguist is including files with linguist-vendored attribute in language statistics

[aWZHY0yQH81uOYvH]

[I've asked this on StackOverflow but have yet to receive an answer]

I have a github repository that is predominately C++ but has lots of vendor-generated C code (drivers for a microcontroller) that is completely throwing off the language statistics. I have read this page and I have created a .gitattributes file in my repository that should mark all these driver files as linguist-vendored and keep them from being included in the statistics. Although git check-attr reports the linguist-vendored attribute as being set, the github-linguist command line tool still ignores this (files are still listed in --breakdown and overall percentages haven't changed). What am I doing wrong?

$ cat .gitattributes
STM32[[:space:]]Code/*/** linguist-vendored
STM32[[:space:]]Code/*/Core/Src/** -linguist-vendored
STM32[[:space:]]Code/*/Core/Inc/** -linguist-vendored

$ git add .gitattributes
$ git commit --amend --no-edit
[master 017861e] fix github language metrics
 Date: Sat Sep 25 16:09:00 2021 -0700
 1 file changed, 3 insertions(+)
 create mode 100644 .gitattributes

$ git check-attr -a "STM32 Code/BLDC/Drivers/STM32F3xx_HAL_Driver/Src/stm32f3xx_hal.c"
STM32 Code/BLDC/Drivers/STM32F3xx_HAL_Driver/Src/stm32f3xx_hal.c: linguist-vendored: set

$ github-linguist --breakdown
94.75%  C
2.92%   C++
2.09%   Makefile
0.23%   Assembly
0.01%   Shell

...
C:
STM32 Code/BLDC/Drivers/STM32F3xx_HAL_Driver/Src/stm32f3xx_hal.c
...

I have also tried changing the .gitattributes file to just

STM32[[:space:]]Code/** linguist-vendored

and it still doesn't ignore the files inside.

[lildude]

SO isn't really the best place to ask questions about Linguist 😁 however I've responded there and will duplicate my response here:

I suspect you may be using an old version of Linguist and/or rugged (which is what does the checking of the gitattributes); possibly the versions shipped with your OS as I can't reproduce your behaviour using the latest version which GitHub is using:

$ gem install github-linguist
Fetching github-linguist-7.16.1.gem
Building native extensions. This could take a while...
Successfully installed github-linguist-7.16.1
1 gem installed
$ git init foo
Initialized empty Git repository in /Users/lildude/Downloads/trash/foo/.git/
$ mkdir -p "foo/STM32 Code/BLDC/Drivers/STM32F3xx_HAL_Driver/Src/"
$ echo "foo" > "foo/STM32 Code/BLDC/Drivers/STM32F3xx_HAL_Driver/Src/stm32f3xx_hal.c"
$ cd foo
$ git add .
$ git commit -m 'Initial commit'
$ github-linguist . --breakdown
100.00% 4          C

C:
STM32 Code/BLDC/Drivers/STM32F3xx_HAL_Driver/Src/stm32f3xx_hal.c

$ echo "STM32[[:space:]]Code/*/** linguist-vendored" > .gitattributes
$ git add .gitattributes
$ git commit -m 'overwrite'
[main 15e0a4e] overwrite
 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+)
 create mode 100644 .gitattributes
$ github-linguist . --breakdown


$

[aWZHY0yQH81uOYvH]

That was the problem! I was using Linguist (version 7.7.0) installed with the apt package manager shipped with Ubuntu 20.04. After uninstalling that package and reinstalling Linguist (version 7.16.1) with gem, it still didn't work even with copy and pasting the exact commands you used to test. Running gem install rugged (which got rugged version 1.2.0) then reinstalling Linguist fixed the problem (IDK if reinstalling Linguist was necessary). So, it seems like the version of rugged that's shipped with Ubuntu 20.04 is old. Thanks for the help!