You'd think this would be an easy question, but since Git is, of course, itself a "Version Control" system Google gets very confused by a query like the title of this post.

Be that as it may, I'm running Eclipse Luna and trying to understand what version of Git is being used by the Eclipse EGit plugin. 

This is so that I can understand what is going on with `.gitignore` files. 

It seems that the [documentation on gitignore provided at the official site](https://git-scm.com/docs/gitignore) is not in synch with the git provider in Eclipse, particularly in regard to the handling of leading and trailing `**` notations. 

I know that the version of git that ships with RHEL 6.7 (git v. 1.7.1) does not handle `**` as per the documentation, and that this was only remedied in 1.8.2, but now I'm also noticing that Eclipse doesn't seem to recognize the `**` either. 

Does anyone know the answer to this?