gitignore and shared worktrees (resend)

I sent the following message a month ago to the mailing list and
never got a reply. Just to make sure it didn't simply get
overlooked, I am reposting.

Basically the issue is with using multiple git repos all sharing the
same worktree, and that I cannot come up with a sensible way to
maintain the .gitignore file such that it is part of the repo (and
thus exists in other clones as well).

I found that one can actually add and commit $GIT_DIR/info/exclude to
a repo (quite possibly a bug), but the checkout fails without -f, so
this is not really an option.

I could set core.excludesfile to some unique name, but that again is
not saved in the repository and requires manual intervention after
cloning.

I still like best the suggestion to honour .gitignore/* in case
.gitignore is a directory instead of a file. Would people be
interested in a patch for this?

----- Forwarded message from martin f krafft [off-list ref] -----

Date: Tue, 17 Jul 2007 15:09:36 +0200
From: martin f krafft <redacted>
To: git@vger.kernel.org
Cc: Johannes Schindelin <redacted>
Subject: gitignore and shared worktrees (was: finding the right remote
	branch for a commit)
Message-ID: [ref]

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,

-- 
martin;              (greetings from the heart of the sun.)
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