gitignore and shared worktrees (was: finding the right remote branch for a commit)

From: martin f krafft <madduck@madduck.net>
Date: Jul 17, 2007, 13:09 UTC
Message-ID: <20070717130936.GA19724@piper.oerlikon.madduck.net>

Sorry for the somewhat late reply, I just found time on the weekend to check out this suggestion by Johannes

  (http://marc.info/?l=git&m=118418927823760&w=2)

also sprach Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de> [2007.07.11.2126 +0200]:

Show 14 quoted lines

> Come to think of it, this is maybe what I would have done, but it
> appears to me that this is the _ideal_ use case for worktree:
> 
> In $HOME/gits:
> 
> $ mkdir vim.git && cd vim.git
> $ git --work-tree=$HOME init
> $ cat >> info/exclude < EOF
> *
> !/.vimrc
> EOF
> 
> Then you could do all Git operations like push, fetch, pull, log in 
> $HOME/gits/vim.git, and all editing in $HOME.

This actually seems to work really nicely, but I am somewhat displeased by the gitignore/exclude handling, since it's local. What I want to do is synchronise the vim configuration across many workstations with git, and I don't want to have to modify $GIT_DIR/info/exclude on each machine.

So I am tempted to use .gitignore, but that lives in the worktree, and since the suggestion is to share worktrees between different git repos, I can only ever have one .gitignore file, which would have to list ignores for *all* repos in $HOME/gits, which breaks my head.

Do you have any other idea on how to handle ignores? I guess one alternative is just to ignore git status output altogether, but that's not really nice.

Would people consider honoring .gitignore-* in addition to just .gitignore? Or maybe even honouring .gitignore/*, if .gitignore is a directory, not a file?

Cheers,

-- 
martin;              (greetings from the heart of the sun.)
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