The global/user wide exclude is a feature that should be more widely known. I frequently have people submitting changes to add their IDE/OS/AI/... files to every project's .gitignore. They are almost always pleasantly surprised when I tell them that they can add them to their standard configuration and have them ignored everywhere without bothering every project and without risk of accidentally committing them on a project where they haven't updated the .gitignore yet.
My general rule is that in-repo .gitignore should only be used for repo-specific things (build outputs, dependency folders, ...) and most user tools should be in their own user config.
You frequently having to tell people about a global configuration gitignore is an obvious consequence of "My general rule is that in-repo .gitignore should only be used for repo-specific things". It wastes less of everyone's time to just gitignore them in every project.
This mindset is how you get lots of IDE/dev-env-specific/platform-specific cruft inside of repos instead of pristine repos. It makes both contribution and maintenance difficult over time. While less of an extreme issue as IDE/dev-env-specific/platform-specific hacks/scripts littering the repo, gitignore entries should be generally justifiable, not ever-growing cruft to be added by each developer specific to their situation.
Fair, but it depends how uniform the culture is around a particular project. Is it haskell and everyone is using emacs? Sure, include those. But trying to chase the requirements of half a dozen different editors is silly.
That's the thing though, you don't need to do that. Whoever is using whatever editor can do it, so the effort is distributed to whoever cares to contribute.
There is no meaningful penalty for it to be not up-to-date. There is only a benefit for people who come in when it's already configured, as they don't need to configure anything anymore.
(I say that but I'm using a global ignore too for eg ai configuration like skills as I like to half-ass them before discarding again)
I've always added it to the project's gitignore because I want to make sure nobody else adds those to the project, either, out of ignorance. I'm mainly doing it out of kindness to them, because I am definitely removing them from git again and it's going to cause them some pain.
In the future, I think I might just be less nice about it. I dunno.
This is how I see it. The more contributors you have with a code base, the larger the possibility that one person will mistakenly commit something that could have easily been avoided by just preemptively adding it to the .gitignore.
You cant preempt every file or folder, but its almost no effort to catch the obvious ones.
Yeap. To reduce pain, you need to work with reality rather than ideals. If you work with a big group, you either add a few lines into your gitignore, or you write code to check for those very same files in your CI/PR system, because you're tired of reversing commits and rejecting PRs because you're the only one that cares about a few extra files.
This is how I see it. The more contributors you have with a code base, the larger the possibility that at least one person will mistakenly commit something that could have easily been avoided by just preemptively adding it to the project .gitignore.
You cant prompt every file or folder, but its almost no effort to catch the obvious ones.
I’m not sure kindness is the best framing. At least, not in terms of being nice to any particular person who might commit unwanted files by mistake.
It’s one of several tools a project can use to ensure quality, alongside eg linters and formatters. Automating those (in this case by defaulting to the expected outcome) reduces friction on basically every operation anyone might do in a project, in any context.
Through the lens of kindness, it benefits you as well as your team… and ultimately everyone else downstream, since you’re all not wasting time and cognitive load on trivially preventable mistakes.
I prefer gitignore since it survives dev container rebuilds.
I can set a creation script or volume to restore/persist configs if I must avoid gitignore. However, that's an extra script or devcontainer mounts config over a gitignore line.
In my opinion (which might not be shared by everyone) this is a you problem. Developers in the team not using decontainers should not have to worry about your environment. ide/local-env stuff should be ignored in the users git setup, everything that the repo creates (build artifacts, environment files etc) should be in the repo.
Interesting case. For the global ignore file, couldn't you just bind-mount that into the container?
> However, that's an extra script or devcontainer mounts config over a gitignore line.
That's an interesting case, where you are crossing operating systems.
---
That said, the easier change is still a one/two line bind mount that trying to exhaustively list ignored directories for every IDE or tool under the sun.
Do you not see the conflict between seeing the same incorrect behaviour again and again, and having a firm rule that expressly forbids the easiest fix to that behaviour?
.DS_Store