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Comment by tremon

1 day ago

That's a very particular way to frame the few vs the many. If a single macOS user works on ten different projects, should all ten projects add that line, or may things be better off taken out of each project's hands and on that single user?

> If a single macOS user works on ten different projects, should all ten projects add that line,

Not only do people think that, they also think that every pet tool that every pet user might decide to use should also end up cluttering up .gitignores for every project on earth. Worse, these people have created whole templates for this, so they can start a new project with ignores for dozens of tools they don't even use. 9 out of 10 times, this includes a broken ignore for Vim swap files.

I think these people are crazy, and like you suggest, tooling that is particular to you should go in the user's ignore, and tooling particular to the project should go into the repo's ignore.

  • I mean I was just making a quick pragmatic suggestion about a labour-saving change that might be more sensible in practice, given that, rather than being a "pet tool" from a "pet user", it's a default side-effect of a platform that is modestly common in the hands of open source developers (as well as a common accidental side-effect from handling tarballs supplied by Mac users to non-Mac users).

    But I wouldn't want to deny anyone an opportunity to regularly rehash a narrow tribal complaint in the comments on a pull request. Yeesh.

I mean sure, if you're this worried about ten bytes and prefer instead to spend time endlessly lecturing new Mac-based submitters about the additional overhead of supporting Mac-based submitters.