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Comment by jmholla | Hacker News Reader

You still want to put these kinds of things in every project where you are collaborating. You can't depend on everyone to know and do this, so best to just be prepared for those who don't.

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I'd prefer to leave them out. That way I can see who's not paying attention when they make commits and are just doing `git commit -a -m "yolo"`.

Surely you'll be able to tell who's YOLOing commits without allowing junk into your repo that you'll have to clean up (and it almost certainly be you doing it, not that other person).

DS_Store files are just annoying, but I've seen whole bin and obj directories, various IDE directories, and all kinds of other stuff committed by people who only know git basics. I've spent way more effort over time cleaning up than I have on adding a comprehensive gitignore file.

It takes practically no effort to include common exclude patterns and avoid all that. Personally, I just grab a gitignore file from GitHub and make a few tweaks here and there:

https://github.com/github/gitignore/

I prefer to leave them in. Why waste my time reviewing PRs that would have been fin otherwise. And, why waste other people's time.

I have this two liner as part of my post-os-install setup script:

    curl -fsSL https://www.toptal.com/developers/gitignore/api/linux > ~/.gitignore
    git config --global core.excludesFile ~/.gitignore

Assuming your global config is ~/.config/git/config, you can download it to ~/.config/git/ignore and not need the overriding explicit excludesFile.

Huh, TIL

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