Documentation: clarify use of .git{ignore,attributes} versus .git/info/*

gitignore patterns can be read from three different
files, while gitattributes can come from two files. Let's
provide some hints to the user about the differences and how
they are typically used.

Suggested by Toby Corkindale, but gratuitously reworded by Jeff King.

Signed-off-by: Toby Corkindale <toby.corkindale@rea-group.com>
Signed-off-by: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
This commit is contained in:
Jeff King 2008-03-27 01:31:00 -04:00 committed by Junio C Hamano
parent 525d461528
commit 90b22907f2
2 changed files with 19 additions and 0 deletions

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@ -63,6 +63,13 @@ path in question, and its parent directories (the further the
directory that contains `.gitattributes` is from the path in
question, the lower its precedence).
If you wish to affect only a single repository (i.e., to assign
attributes to files that are particular to one user's workflow), then
attributes should be placed in the `$GIT_DIR/info/attributes` file.
Attributes which should be version-controlled and distributed to other
repositories (i.e., attributes of interest to all users) should go into
`.gitattributes` files.
Sometimes you would need to override an setting of an attribute
for a path to `unspecified` state. This can be done by listing
the name of the attribute prefixed with an exclamation point `!`.

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@ -38,6 +38,18 @@ precedence, the last matching pattern decides the outcome):
* Patterns read from the file specified by the configuration
variable 'core.excludesfile'.
Which file to place a pattern in depends on how the pattern is meant to
be used. Patterns which should be version-controlled and distributed to
other repositories via clone (i.e., files that all developers will want
to ignore) should go into a `.gitignore` file. Patterns which are
specific to a particular repository but which do not need to be shared
with other related repositories (e.g., auxiliary files that live inside
the repository but are specific to one user's workflow) should go into
the `$GIT_DIR/info/exclude` file. Patterns which a user wants git to
ignore in all situations (e.g., backup or temporary files generated by
the user's editor of choice) generally go into a file specified by
`core.excludesfile` in the user's `~/.gitconfig`.
The underlying git plumbing tools, such as
linkgit:git-ls-files[1] and linkgit:git-read-tree[1], read
`gitignore` patterns specified by command-line options, or from