Re: Lack of system-level excludesFile

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Oct 3, 2024, 21:55 UTC
Message-ID: <xmqqh69shmwe.fsf@gitster.g>
In-Reply-To: <20241003212451.GA12763@coredump.intra.peff.net>

Jeff King <peff@peff.net> writes:

> PS If you want to get really wild, consider this: the exclude/ignore
>    feature is really just a proper subset of the attributes system that
>    came later. If we were designing today, we could ditch .gitignore
>    entirely in favor of a special "ignored" attribute,

Yes, this was brought up in the past a few times.

Both the exclude stack (in dir.c) and attr stack (in attr.c) use a similar approach to optimize the accesses to the data for callers that traverse the paths in-order and ask if something is ignored (or has this attribute) for each of the paths they encounter, so their performance characteristics might be similar. It certainly is a tempting thought and indeed is a big project, especially if you want to keep some sort of backward compatibility ;-)