Some old man Java rambling for you. :) (I am ex-Rails actually) one of the big things about Java that at first I thought was tedious but now have come to love

Some old man Java rambling for you. :) (I am ex-Rails actually) one of the big things about Java that at first I thought was tedious but now have come to love is the build process. By creating the "built" project in a new folder, it is like you are guaranteeing that only stuff you manually specify to be in the production code actually makes it in. i know .gitignore is supposed to handle this but it just seems dangerous to rely on source-control related filters when there is really sensitive security info involved. in node i've used grunt & really like that model. The idea being that you have the project run a build then check that into a "build" branch in git & deploy from there. it's also nice because i can uglify etc. if i'm not worried about preserving the source. I guess for distributed coding this is tough because you want your peers to have access to the raw source + build instructions, but if I were working on a really security-sensitive project (I do enterprise so I'm starting to understand the need for extra precautions) I would probably only distribute code that goes through a (perhaps even thin/transparent) build process & then figure out a way to integrate changes back into the source branch. I know it must sound like overkill to the open source world & especially for Rails projects, where there ordinarily is no build stage, but it seems like there is some level of danger in distributing a source control repo where you are relying on you + any collaborators to properly configure .gitignore and never accidentally check anything sensitive into the repo. I am decent with git but no expert, i still sometimes accidentally stage things I shouldn't when initially checking in a .gitignore -- and i have much more faith in myself than some of my peers, hah.