Re: What .gitignore files do in the tarball?

Euler Taveira <euler(at)timbira(dot)com(dot)br> writes:
> +1 to remove all of those files.

Meh. We've always shipped that stuff; before git, we shipped .cvsignore
files, and there were no complaints about it, going back twenty years at
this point. If the files amounted to anything meaningful space-wise,
I would agree, but as things stand I see no value in removing them.

One plausible argument for them being useful to downstream users is that
they provide positive documentation as to what derived files can be
expected to appear while building the code. (In this connection, I note
that CVS didn't produce complaints about stray files, so that we had to
work quite a bit on the ignore-files when we converted from CVS to git.
That seems like useful value-added information.)

I also have a personal reason for not removing them, which is that
I usually verify built tarballs by diff'ing them against my local git
checkout. I do not need the noise of a bunch of "Only in ..." complaints
from that.

regards, tom lane