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From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
To: Phillip Wood <phillip.wood123@gmail.com>
Cc: Sebastian Thiel <sebastian.thiel@icloud.com>,  git@vger.kernel.org,
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Subject: Re: [RFC] Define "precious" attribute and support it in `git clean`
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	lindbergh.monkeyblade.net

Phillip Wood <phillip.wood123@gmail.com> writes:

> One thought I had was that we could abuse the comment syntax to
> annotate paths something like
>
> #(keep)
> /my-precious-file
>
> would prevent /my-precious-file from being deleted by git clean (and
> hopefully unpack-trees()[1]). It means that older versions of git
> would treat the file as ignored. If we ever want more than one
> annotation per path we could separate them with commas
>
> #(keep,something-else)
> /my-file
>
> Strictly speaking it is a backward incompatible change but I doubt
> there are many people using comments like that.

;-)

If "#(" feels a bit too generic, that part can be bikeshed.

I might find some example use cases why we shouldn't later, but
offhand, the idea of (ab)using the comment is a very good idea.