gitignore and shared worktrees (was: finding the right remote branch for a commit)

Sorry for the somewhat late reply, I just found time on the weekend
to check out this suggestion by Johannes

  (http://marc.info/?l=git&m=118418927823760&w=2)

also sprach Johannes Schindelin [off-list ref] [2007.07.11.2126 +0200]:

Come to think of it, this is maybe what I would have done, but it
appears to me that this is the _ideal_ use case for worktree:

In $HOME/gits:

$ mkdir vim.git && cd vim.git
$ git --work-tree=$HOME init
$ cat >> info/exclude < EOF
*
!/.vimrc
EOF

Then you could do all Git operations like push, fetch, pull, log in 
$HOME/gits/vim.git, and all editing in $HOME.

This actually seems to work really nicely, but I am somewhat
displeased by the gitignore/exclude handling, since it's local. What
I want to do is synchronise the vim configuration across many
workstations with git, and I don't want to have to modify
$GIT_DIR/info/exclude on each machine.

So I am tempted to use .gitignore, but that lives in the worktree,
and since the suggestion is to share worktrees between different git
repos, I can only ever have one .gitignore file, which would have to
list ignores for *all* repos in $HOME/gits, which breaks my head.

Do you have any other idea on how to handle ignores? I guess one
alternative is just to ignore git status output altogether, but
that's not really nice.

Would people consider honoring .gitignore-* in addition to just
.gitignore? Or maybe even honouring .gitignore/*, if .gitignore is
a directory, not a file?

Cheers,

-- 
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