[PATCH] .gitignore: Ignore cscope and other *tags files

[Laine Stump]

On 2/3/23 2:49 AM, Erik Skultety wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 02, 2023 at 02:02:13PM -0500, Laine Stump wrote:
>> On 2/2/23 10:37 AM, Martin Kletzander wrote:
>>> Commit f7114e61dbc2 cleaned up way too much and now that I have cscope
>>> working again I noticed there are some files that ought to stay ignored.
>>>
>>> Signed-off-by: Martin Kletzander <mkletzan at redhat.com>
>>
>> Reviewed-by-with-prejudice: Laine Stump <laine at redhat.com>
>>
>> I had sent a patch a year or two ago (maybe longer?) to re-add the cscope
>> files to the ignore, but someone expressed reluctance (because I should be
>> putting that in a global ignore or something, I forget), so rather than
>> ruffle feathers I just dropped the patch and spent the last two years being
>> mildly ignored each time I ran git status (I overcame the threshold of sloth

s/ignored/annoyed/

(I wouldn't really care if I was ignored - that's somebody else's 
problem :-)

>> one time to get rid of it, but couldn't manage the tiny amount of ambition
>> for a 2nd).
> 
> Yes. Unfortunately, the patch has been pushed already. Although cscope might be
> common among libvirt devs, it isn't something related to the project. The point
> is, whatever artifact that doesn't come directly from a libvirt build,
> automation or other helper scripts we maintain in the repo should NOT be put
> into the project's gitignore and instead should go to one's global .gitignore
> in their home.

Okay, now you've forced me to go look it up....

And, it turns out that just creating a ~/.gitignore isn't sufficient; 
you must also tell git where your global .gitignore file is located, with:

   git config --global core.excludesfile ~/.gitignore

If only I'd had the ambition to spend that 30 seconds sometime in the 
last 2 years :-P

> 
> Here's another example which better explains it in Python. There are so many
> IDEs that are commonly used nowadays by developers? Is an IDE forced by the
> project? Most likely not. Wether it's PyCharm, Eclipse, Qt or whatever it is
> people consider the best environment since the invention of sliced bread, all
> of these create  a bunch of app specific hidden files that maintaining such a
> .gitignore becomes unpleasant quickly. The outcome then is that there is a
> Github repo (too lazy to search for it) providing gitignore templates for new
> projects which already contain most of these artifacts. So, even though this is
> pure bike shedding, there is really isn't a compelling reason to have anything
> strictly unrelated to the project in the repo's gitignore file.

And yet we have lines in our .gitignore for "emacs-related" and 
"vim-related" ignores (the latter was *added* in the same commit that 
removed the cscope files :-P).

> Now, the story
> would normally be the same for ctags, but we already do maintain '.ctags' as
> part of the repo - was it the right decision to have included in the first
> place? Probably not, but removing it now is pointless, but at the same time IMO
> using it as a precedent to add more project-unrelated artifact ignores is also
> not correct.

I see your point, but the precedent was already set - byproduct files of 
the developers' environment can be included in .gitignore; anything 
beyond that is just a matter of degree and opinion (and, as I said, any 
removal has been inconsistent - the same patch removed cscope files, but 
added vim files).

Another point to consider is that having "common" excluded files in the 
project .gitignore will lead to less user error among novice 
contributors who don't know about the global .gitignore, and just run 
"git add" to add *everything* to their commit. Then we need to either 
waste time with back-and-forth in email telling them to resubmit without 
the extra files, or else go to the trouble of locally removing those 
files from the patch before pushing it. How many times has that 
happened? None that I recall. How many times might it have happened if 
the "emacs related" and "vim related" sections weren't in the project 
.gitignore? No idea, very possibly 0. But it's a nice bikeshed argument 
for the end of a Friday afternoon.

(Anyway, now that I've been forced to spend the 30 seconds, I am no 
longer saddened by the idea of removing the cscope files from 
.gitignore, although it does seem like a wasted of effort once they're 
already in. Almost nearly 1/10th as much effort as I've wasted on this 
reply :-))