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

[Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>]

Jeff King <peff@peff.net> writes:

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

No question about it, but at the same time I can sort of see how
useful being able to read from more than one would be.

But for this particular one, I viewed the topic as adding a new
option as a shorter way for passing multiple -e <pattern> options on
the command line.  When viewed that way, even if core.excludesfile
were multi-valued, I wouldn't have imagined that people would try to
use that mechanism for such a purpose--for one thing, the precedence
order is wrong for that purpose, isn't it?