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I've considered (overuse of) .gitignore an antipattern for several years now. I've been bitten too many times by it hiding the differences between my local repo

I've considered (overuse of) .gitignore an antipattern for several years now. I've been bitten too many times by it hiding the differences between my local repo and someone else's. With some projects that ignore build artifacts it's very difficult to know whether you've successfully performed a clean or not. I don't see a problem with having a dirty repo. It makes it clear how the state of my local directory is different from what's in source control. Isn't that the whole point? I'm sure I'm missing something, but so far I haven't missed .gitignore.

darau1 4y ago
In my experience, people tend to `git commit -am "nonsense"` no matter how many times I tell them not to. .gitignore at least ensures they don't add too much nonsense to the repository.
CGamesPlay 4y ago
You can easily use git status --ignored for those cases where you really want to see all the cruft you’ve accumulated. Or you can make an alias to mask status and add that flag, then use git status --ignored=no when you don’t want the behavior.