Re: [PATCH] clean: new option --exclude-from

[Jeff King <peff@peff.net>]

On Tue, Dec 01, 2015 at 06:18:30PM -0800, Junio C Hamano wrote:

> > Should this perhaps be an option to the main "git" to append to the set
> > of excludes?
> >
> > You can kind-of do this already with:
> >
> >   git -c core.excludesfile=/path/to/whatever clean ...
> >
> > but of course you might be using core.excludesfile already. I wonder if
> > that config option should take multiple values and respect all of them,
> > rather than last-one-wins.
> 
> It is likely that existing users are already using $HOME/.gitconfig
> that sets core.excludesfile=$HOME/.gitconfig as the personal
> fallback, that is overriden, not tweaked, by project specific
> settings of the same variable in .git/config, so that would not fly
> very well, I suspect.

Maybe. I would think the more common setup is:

  1. Personal exclude files (e.g., your editor's backup files) come from
     ~/.gitconfig.

  2. Per-project personal excludes go directly into .git/info/exclude.

But you're right that it would be a backwards-incompatible change.

-Peff