Michael J Gruber wrote: > If you want to ignore format patch output, simply use .git/info/excludes > or a global excludes file, but please don't force everyone else to live > with that or work around it. Side note: I said with similar intent that this allows developers to work “without interference”. This was a poor choice of words on my part: a too-long .gitignore only prevents me from noticing and tracking files that others considered not worth tracking. >From the thread I faintly remembered and then linked to[1]: ;-) I earlier said that "*~" should not be in project-wide .gitignore file because use of Emacs vs vi is a matter of personal taste, and Emacs specific "*~" pattern does not belong to a project policy, just like vim "*.swp" pattern doesn't. But I think that reasoning is flawed. The right criteria should not be about "use of Emacs vs vi", but about "do we in this project ever want to track files that match *~ or *.swp as legitimate contents". If a project expects not to have a tracked file whose name ends with ".swp", even if it does _not_ mean to encourage use of vim over Emacs or any other editor, I think it is fine to add such to its tracked .gitignore file for its developer's benefit. This does not change my conclusion: there are many other reasons to leave files produced outside the build process unlisted: . consistency: to keep the file intuitive and avoid a lot of patch churn, it is nicest to choose one rule and stick to it . simplicity: shorter .gitignore. Making the appropriate content of .gitignore depend on the behavior of too many text editors (and IDEs, and foreign VCSes, and debugging tools, and ...) makes it hard to maintain. See qt’s .gitignore for an example of this. . correctness: for the case of format-patch, it is hard to say "we will never want to track files that match ????-*.patch as legitimate contents". In fact, it is likely such files may need to be added to the test suite. And unlike .o files and company, it does not seem likely that formatted patches need to be kept around during development. I hope that is a little clearer. Sorry for the ramble. Jonathan [1] http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/96220/focus=96294 -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html