File extension conflict when working with git and latex

Hi,

I struggled with a really nasty issue today (and yesterday):

I work on a semester project paper which is written in latex and therefor version-controlled with git. We compile the document using pdflatex, we automate the compiling with make.

pdflatex generates some temporary files, which are required if you call it the second and third time (it is a top-down compiler, which needs to be called several times). One of the file extensions is ".idx", which (kind of) conflicts with file extensions in .git/.

Unfortunetely, we wrote our `make clean` task recursively. I think you can imagine what went wrong: The clean-task corrupted the repository, as it removed .idx files from within .git/.

I lost work because of this ugly name collision.

My question now:

I know, I can fix this by fixing the clean task in my Makefile. But maybe someone somewhere on this world doesn't know the git internals as good as me (and, of course, my coworker). Is there _any chance at all_ that this gets mentioned somewhere, so others don't fall into this pit?