gitignore and shared worktrees (resend)

From: martin f krafft <madduck@madduck.net>
Date: Aug 16, 2007, 10:22 UTC
Message-ID: <20070816102225.GA5351@piper.oerlikon.madduck.net>
In-Reply-To: <20070717130936.GA19724@piper.oerlikon.madduck.net>

I sent the following message a month ago to the mailing list and never got a reply. Just to make sure it didn't simply get overlooked, I am reposting.

Basically the issue is with using multiple git repos all sharing the same worktree, and that I cannot come up with a sensible way to maintain the .gitignore file such that it is part of the repo (and thus exists in other clones as well).

I found that one can actually add and commit $GIT_DIR/info/exclude to a repo (quite possibly a bug), but the checkout fails without -f, so this is not really an option.

I could set core.excludesfile to some unique name, but that again is not saved in the repository and requires manual intervention after cloning.

I still like best the suggestion to honour .gitignore/* in case .gitignore is a directory instead of a file. Would people be interested in a patch for this?

----- Forwarded message from martin f krafft <madduck@madduck.net> -----

Date: Tue, 17 Jul 2007 15:09:36 +0200
From: martin f krafft <madduck@madduck.net>
To: git@vger.kernel.org
Cc: Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de>
Subject: gitignore and shared worktrees (was: finding the right remote
	branch for a commit)
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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