Re: Questions, improvements

On 2021-10-20 at 12:25:32, BARDOT Jérôme wrote:

Unfortunately, there are a lot of different patterns here. Some IDEs use entire directories, and sometimes those patterns conflict with common patterns used elsewhere.

For example, GitHub's recommended Visual Studio .gitignore[0] recommends excluding directories "Bin" and "bin". However, it is extremely common for folks to have a "bin" directory in their dotfiles (I do, at least), and that would cause problems.

It is generally recommended that projects try to remain reasonably editor independent so that people can use whichever editor they prefer. As a result, many projects don't include any editor-specific .gitignore patterns, and rely on each individual user using their `core.excludesfile` settings to ignore their own editor's and operating system's files (e.g., Vim swap files). Only editor-agnostic files, such as .editorconfig files or files to run linting or formatting tools, are included.

Also, when you try to pick common patterns, you end up with having to decide what "common" means. Should we support every editor's temporary files, no matter how infrequently used? Should we only support the top N editors? How do we decide which editors we should support? How do we decide which OSes we should support? Should all patterns be case insensitive to support the most OSes, or case sensitive to prevent false positives? How do we limit the rules to avoid bad performance from giant lists of rules? How do we resolve conflicts between these rules?

As you can see, it becomes quite sticky pretty quickly, and we're basically bound to make somebody unhappy. Letting each project decide the appropriate rules for them may not please everybody, but it at least displeases far fewer people, and it lets the people most competent to decide those rules (the project leaders) make the decision.

[0] https://github.com/github/gitignore/blob/master/VisualStudio.gitignore