is there a truly compelling rationale for .git/info/exclude?

   currently having a discussion with ben straub of "pro git" notoriety,
and he and i seem to agree that there's not much value in registering
ignore patterns in a repo-specific .git/info/exclude file.

   on the one hand, the .gitignore files that come with a repo would
represent (in ben's terminology, which i really like) the "intrinsic"
patterns to be ignored that are related to the basic content of the repo.

   at the other end, users are certainly welcome to add extra patterns
to be ignored, based purely on the way they work -- perhaps based on
their choice of editor, they might want to exclude *.swp files, or
if working on a Mac, ignore .DS_Store, and so on, using a
core.excludesFile setting.

   and in this funny grey area in between, we have .git/info/exclude,
to be used for ... what, exactly? the one argument i've come up with
is the situation where you discover that a repo you've cloned has an
incomplete set of .gitignore patterns, and while you submit a patch
for that to the maintainer, you can temporarily add that pattern
to .git/info/exclude, and as soon as the patch is accepted, you can
toss it.

   but even that isn't a really compelling reason. so what's it for?

rday