On March 5, 2025 5:43 PM, brian m. carlson wrote: >On 2025-03-04 at 11:49:14, Tech Kenya wrote: >> >> >> I would like to propose an enhancement to git init that allows users to specify a >language or framework when initializing a repository, automatically applying an >appropriate .gitignore template. >> >> Proposal >> >> Introduce a flag to git init that enables users to initialize a repository with a >predefined .gitignore based on the project's language or framework. For example: >> >> git init --golang >> git init --python >> git init --node >> >> This would generate a .gitignore file using well-established templates, such as >those from Toptal's Gitignore Generator >https://www.toptal.com/developers/gitignore/ or GitHub's official .gitignore >repository. > >I think this is an interesting idea, but unfortunately, I think it's going to be practically >difficult to implement. You've mentioned three very common languages, but there >are a lot of programming languages and even more compiler environments, and it >wouldn't be practical for us to try to support them all. > >For instance, I use Neovim, and the version I'm using ships with 693 different syntax >files, which means that there's about 693 different programming languages >supported. I was recently exposed at work to some languages that I'd never heard >about before and which are not supported by Neovim, and presumably those users >would also want similar functionality. > >That is compounded by the fact that there are a lot of OS- and environment-specific >configuration. As an example, a C project on macOS might want to ignore XCode- >related files, but for a project that's only on Linux, that wouldn't be necessary. >Similarly, that C project might create shared libraries that should be ignored, but >those might end up with any of `.so`, `.sl`, `.dylib`, or `.dll` extensions. > >You mentioned some possible sources for this configuration, but we try not to >prioritize specific outside projects. So just because GitHub is widely used and some >GitHub employees contribute to Git doesn't mean we give it special precedence or >privileges, and we wouldn't want to prioritize their specific collection (or any other), >nor would be want `git init` to attempt to make a network connection. We also >don't want to maintain this collection ourselves, since it's very project specific. > >What Git _does_ provide is a way to create a template of objects that should be in >the `.git` directory using the `--template` option. It's possible to create a template >that contains an initial commit with a `.gitignore` file. I personally would not >recommend this approach, since it will not work gracefully with alternate ref >formats or hash algorithms, but it is an option for people who want to use it. This >was in common use for setting up the default branch name before `git init` added >the `-b` option and it's related config, so it is well tested. One way to deal with this is to add language-specific descriptors. What I did in my own front end is to provide a set of regex patterns that define the relevant portions of the languages and extensions. This allows my end-users to add their own languages and leave me out of it completely. It might be workable if we have a quantified extensible language structure for this. Otherwise, this might be DOA. --Randall
