Re: gitignore vs. exclude vs assume-unchanged?

alex@bellandwhistle.net writes:

Please don't force people to refer to external site.

The .gitignore and .git/info/exclude are the two UIs to invoke the same mechanism. In-tree .gitignore are to be shared among project members (i.e. everybody working on the project should consider the paths that match the ignore pattern in there as cruft). On the other hand, .git/info/exclude is meant for personal ignore patterns (i.e. you, while working on the project, consider them as cruft).

Assume-unchanged should not be abused for an ignore mechanism. It is "I know my filesystem operations are slow. I'll promise Git that I won't change these paths by making them with that bit---that way, Git does not have to check if I changed things in there every time I ask for 'git status' output". It does not mean anything other than that. Especially, it is *not* a promise by Git that Git will always consider these paths are unmodified---if Git can determine a path that is marked as assume-unchanged has changed without incurring extra lstat(2) cost, it reserves the right to report that the path *has been* modified (as a result, "git commit -a" is free to commit that change).