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Comment by kevincox | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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)

The penalty is a long file full of cruft that's effectively impossible to ever clean up.

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.

I add .DS_Store to every repo despite also having it ignored globally. Efficiency beats pristine. I don't want to have to ever think about or deal with it at all.

but you do think about it when you add it to every repo?

Arguably git should ignore this file by default. 99% of the time it shouldn't be automatically picked up when you want to make a commit.

It would also be nice if Finder stopped generating .DS_Store files and moved that information to metadata on the directory! They had a great opportunity to fix this when they introduced APFS but alas the blight continues.

Arguably it does: Every default .gitignore I’ve ever seen has included it.

> Efficiency beats pristine. _I_ don't want [...]

Emphasis mine. This is the exact mindset I'm referring to, and when applied generally to files in the repo, will bite at some point. Even if you're lucky and it's unimportant/internal enough not to bite users, it will bite contributors. Luckily none of us would be discourteous enough to do this while contributing to another's repo.

If it's my repo then I decide which files are tracked and I don't want any .DS_Store files, nor do I think any person in history has ever intended to track a .DS_Store file.

In a perfect world everyone would add .DS_Store to their global ignore list but since this is not default it necessitates defensive measures.

If you don't add it to .gitignore then I can guarantee at some point a .DS_Store file will be committed to the repo, because the behavior is broken by default.

I’d really only like my projects to talk about things relevant to the project, instead of having to think about the fact that you might be using Qt Creator.

Eh. It's a tool, not a document. It should contain things that help development.

Every time I've requested changes to a pull request because the reviewee didn't know the difference between .gitignore and .config/git/ignore, the reviewee appreciated learning about the feature. The person you're replying to also clearly said their reviewees are pleasantly surprised, so it hardly seems like a waste of time. Also consider that it takes almost no effort on our part to point out this feature, no effort for them to learn it because we tell them directly, and it happens at most once per new contributor or hire.

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.

Well, that's what I get for being an idiot.

That's an interesting case, where you are crossing operating systems.

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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?

I am getting the impression that people both see and enjoy the conflict. :-/

Or if your editor is happy to store them in a subfolder that is useful. I use Sublime with the AutoProjects extension and it puts .sublime-project snd .sublime-workspace under a .sublime folder that I can have a .gitignore * underneath.

I'd rather have a pristine repo (no .ds_store/.idea/etc) than a pristine .gitignore file.

Well you still ignore those things, just not with a committed .gitignore. Now your repo and your gitignore are pristine

.DS_Store

My computer doesn’t make .DS_Store files. If yours does, it’s your responsibility to not litter the codebase with them.

Corollary: My computer does make other kinds of files, and you’d never know it.

I agree.

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