Re: git overwriting local ignored files?

From: David Mandelberg <david@mandelberg.org>
Date: Nov 24, 2018, 14:37 UTC
Message-ID: <7ac49733-2e62-7d29-36aa-99df4124b54c@mandelberg.org>
In-Reply-To: <xmqqftvr2jfo.fsf@gitster-ct.c.googlers.com>

On 11/23/18 11:22 PM, Junio C Hamano wrote:

Show 11 quoted lines

> David Mandelberg <david@mandelberg.org> writes:
> 
>> It seems that git is overwriting my local files on merge if they're in
>> .gitignore. See command transcript below. I searched `git help config`
>> and Google, but I couldn't find any way to prevent it. Am I missing
>> something? (The reason I care about ignored files is that I'm using
>> git with a working directory of $HOME to manage my dotfiles, and most
>> files in my $HOME are not tracked by git but are still important.)
> 
> The .gitignore file is to list "ignored and expendable" class of
> files; there is no "ignored but precious class" in Git.

Ok. Would a patch be welcome? I have three ideas for how to implement it, and I'm not sure which is better.

1. Add a boolean config option called core.preserveIgnore (or similar). 
I'm guessing this is the least amount of work, but it's not very 
flexible. I'm also not sure how it should work with `git clean`.

2. Add some syntax to the .gitignore format so the same file can list 
both "ignored and expendable" and "ignored and precious". I could see 
using this to mark compiled files as ignored+expendable and per-repo 
editor/IDE config files as ignored+precious. Do you have any idea how 
big of a patch this would be? Or any idea for the new syntax? I think 
starting a line with "\x" where x is any character not currently escaped 
by a backslash would cause the least disruption to existing .gitignore 
files.

3. Like (2), but use a separate file instead of .gitignore (and the 
other git-ignore files).

Any thoughts?

-- 
https://david.mandelberg.org/