Re: merging .gitignore

also sprach Johannes Schindelin [off-list ref] [2007.10.01.1457 +0100]:

You might be interested in writing a merge driver.  See 
Documentation/gitattributes.txt.

This is an excellent idea; thanks.



also sprach Andy Parkins [off-list ref] [2007.10.01.1448 +0100]:

Then, assuming the conflicts you get now occur for a reason, you
will get conflicts within the .gitignore.d/ directory.  Let's say
branchCignores adds *.o and branchFignores removes *.o from the
ignores.  Who is right?  Who knows, and worse than that you didn't
see the conflict when it happened so it wasn't resolved and the
master branch was left with conflicts in it.

Well, with gitignore I am ready to say that merges should be
resolved in an additive way. Remember that I am talking about an
intergration branch, and if feature branches A and B used to ignore
.o files, and now B suddenly does not ignore them anymore, the only
real reason I can think of is that it was rewritten in a languages
other than C*. So then you *still* want to ignore .o files in the
integration branch.

Basically I am saying that it should be

  cat $gitignore_files | sort -u

and obviously, this is something for a specific merge driver, as
Johannes suggested.

Thanks for the feedback,

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