Glob order matters for negated wildcard paths when it shouldn't

[jjspace]

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What were you expecting to happen?

The docs for globs in gulp.src seem to indicate that order should not matter. Up until now this has always seemed to be the case.

We are using gulp.src to select a number of files across our project including a mix of wildcard ** and single file globs. I wanted to negate a nested directory using another ** wildcard path and put it next to the "parent" directory in the list for organization. However this seems to fail unless the negated path is at the end of the array.

Error: File not found with singular glob: /[path]/test-gulp/test.config (if this was purposeful, use `allowEmpty` option)

If the order does matter I think it would be good to point that out more in the docs and provide a more clear error message that this may be the case. Right now that error message implies that a file that does exist does not.

Please give us a sample of your gulpfile

Given a fresh project with the following structure:

.
├── gulpfile.js
├── issue
├── package.json
├── src
│   ├── exclude
│   │   └── file2.txt
│   └── file1.txt
└── test.config

Setup commands

mkdir test-gulp
cd test-gulp
mkdir -p src/exclude
touch src/file1.txt
touch src/exclude/file2.txt
touch test.config
npm init -y
npm install gulp

import gulp from 'gulp';
import { Transform } from 'readable-stream';

gulp.task(function testSource(cb) {
  const files = gulp.src(
    [
      'src/**',
      // '!src/exclude/**', // <-- if put here it will fail without allowEmpty
      'test.config',
      '!src/exclude/**', // <-- if put here it will work regardless
    ],
    {
      // allowEmpty: true,
    }
  );

  files.pipe(
    new Transform({
      objectMode: true,
      transform: (file, _, cb) => {
        // simple stream to log the files it's working on
        console.log(file.path);
        cb(null, file);
      },
    })
  );

  cb();
});

Terminal output / screenshots

npx gulp testSource

should output

/[path]/test-gulp/src/file1.txt
/[path]/test-gulp/test.config

but if you put the negated path for src/exclude before the test.config path it errors with

Error: File not found with singular glob: /[path]/test-gulp/test.config (if this was purposeful, use `allowEmpty` option)

If you add allowEmpty: true to the options it does work again and output the 2 files shown above. However I would ideally like to keep allowEmpty off to catch actual issues with the build and missing files.

Please provide the following information:

• OS & version [e.g. MacOS Catalina 10.15.4]: Kubuntu 25.04
• node version (run node -v): 20.19.2
• npm version (run npm -v): 11.4.2
• gulp version (run gulp -v): 5.0.1