Richard Kerry [off-list ref] writes:
An option might be to state, in config, whether a project, or
everything, should be managed on the basis of "all untracked files
are precious" or "files may be explicitly marked precious", or, as
now, "nothing is precious".
I do not think there is any need to have a separate "all or none"
option. We do not have to make things more complicated than
necessary.
If all untracked files are precious, a user should be able to say so
with an entry that matches all paths "*" to mark them precious, and
nothing more needs to be done. By default nothing is ignored and
nothing is precious, until you start marking paths with .gitignore
entries.