Does sparse-checkout act on tracked file?

Question

My local and remote server both are centos 7.
I tracked README.md in local repo with git version 1.8.3.1.When I revised README.md and push to remote bare repo, I don't want README.md to be checked out.
In remote repo,git version is 2.16.6,I set post-receive as below:

while read oldrev newrev ref
do
     if [[ $ref = refs/heads/"$BRANCH" ]];
        then
        git --work-tree="$DEPLOY_DIR"  --git-dir="$GIT_DIR" checkout -f
     fi
done

In remote repo,I set sparse-checkout as below:

/*
!/README.md

I found README.md still there,and not modified.

Then,I revised sparse-checkout as below:

!/README.md
/*

I got remote: error: Entry 'README.md' not uptodate. Cannot merge.

which sparse-checkout is correct?Where is the problem?

Answer 1

It's time to play spot-the-differences. Here's my test setup, it shows the sparse checkout working properly when I doit. This is a straight c&p out of my terminal buffers, copy the function definition and say doit.

$ doit () { 
set -x
git init testlocal; cd $_
git commit --allow-empty -m-
git clone --bare . ../testremote; cd $_
git config core.sparsecheckout true
mkdir -p hooks info worktree
printf %s\\n /\* \!/README.md >info/sparse-checkout
tee hooks/post-receive <<'EOD'; chmod +x $_
while read oldrev newrev ref; do
        if [[ $ref = refs/heads/master ]]; then
                git --work-tree="$GIT_DIR/worktree" checkout -f
        fi
done
EOD
cd -
touch notREADME.md README.md
git add .; git commit -m-
git push ../testremote master
ls ../testremote/worktree
set +x
}
$ doit
+ git init testlocal
Initialized empty Git repository in /home/jthill/src/snips/testlocal/.git/
+ cd testlocal
/home/jthill/src/snips/testlocal
+ git commit --allow-empty -m-
[master (root-commit) 6ed44ec] -
+ git clone --bare . ../testremote
Cloning into bare repository '../testremote'...
done.
+ cd ../testremote
+ git config core.sparsecheckout true
+ mkdir -p hooks info worktree
+ printf '%s\n' '/*' '!/README.md'
+ tee hooks/post-receive
while read oldrev newrev ref
do
     if [[ $ref = refs/heads/master ]];
        then
        git --work-tree="$GIT_DIR/worktree" checkout -f
     fi
done
+ chmod +x hooks/post-receive
+ cd -
/home/jthill/src/snips/testlocal
+ touch notREADME.md README.md
+ git add .
+ git commit -m-
[master 64f5358] -
 2 files changed, 0 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)
 create mode 100644 README.md
 create mode 100644 notREADME.md
+ git push ../testremote master
Enumerating objects: 4, done.
Counting objects: 100% (4/4), done.
Delta compression using up to 4 threads
Compressing objects: 100% (2/2), done.
Writing objects: 100% (3/3), 240 bytes | 240.00 KiB/s, done.
Total 3 (delta 0), reused 0 (delta 0), pack-reused 0
To ../testremote
   6ed44ec..64f5358  master -> master
+ ls --color=auto ../testremote/worktree
notREADME.md
+ set +x