Re: Default exclude rules for Git

From: Avery Pennarun <apenwarr@gmail.com>
Date: Sep 19, 2008, 16:42 UTC
Message-ID: <32541b130809190942j10dfde82q15726772a7657520@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <20080919163311.GH10544@machine.or.cz>

On Fri, Sep 19, 2008 at 12:33 PM, Petr Baudis <pasky@suse.cz> wrote:

Show 5 quoted lines

> Yes, but the idea here is to give both the projects and the users
> sensible default to work on, in case of users even one that might change
> system to system based on tools behavior. It is that VAST MAJORITY of
> projects won't care about object or (most kinds of) hidden files, so to
> me it makes sense to make people opt out instead of opt in.

The problem here is that the cost of a false positive (ie. too much ignored) is much greater than the cost of a false negative (ie. too little ignored).

In the very worst case, if too few files are ignored and a developer is paying no attention at all, then a *.o or *~ file gets committed; you can just delete it again. But if too *many* files are ignored, you can work on your private branch for weeks at a time, thinking you're keeping regular snapshots, and actually all your commits are useless because an important file was never versioned.

I never, ever want to end up in the latter situation, so even though I start virtually every git project by putting "*.[oa]" and "*~" in my .gitignore, I'm glad it's *me* doing that and not somebody else.

Have fun,

Avery