.gitignore of tests

[Herbert Valerio Riedel]

Hello!

On 2014-07-29 at 08:25:15 +0200, Dr. ERDI Gergo wrote:
> Is there a good reason we have a single monolithic .gitignore file in
> testuiste/ instead of one per directory? It just feels so
> unnecessarily burdensome to maintain it compared to just putting four
> lines in a new .gitignore file...

That's a good question I've been wondering about as well. I recently
merged a few single .gitignore files I found in testsuite/ sub-folders
into the main testsuite/.gitignore file it was rather inconsistent to
have most stuff listed in the monolithic testsuite/.gitignore file and
just a few deliberate .gitignores in a few sub-folders:

  http://git.haskell.org/ghc.git/commitdiff/767b9ddf7d2ea2bb99d49372c79be129fc2058ce

The other issue is tooling. Some Git front-ends such as
http://magit.github.io/ don't even recognize non-top-level .gitignore
files (yet), and certainly don't offer to create one if they don't find
it in the current sub-folder (instead magit just adds it to the
top-level gitignore file)

Also, I'm not sure if having .gitignore files sprinkled all over the
source-tree instead of having just a few .gitignore files would be so
much better, as in order to compute the "effective .gitignore", you have
to consider the union of all existing .gitignore files up to the
top-level folder (while not crossing Git repo boundaries).

However, we *can* switch to a scheme where we use many little per-folder
.gitignore files, but everyone would have to agree to follow that new
scheme, or we'll end up with a mess of confusing possibly overlapping
.gitignore files.

Cheers,
  hvr