From the cycle "Topic of the day" - .gitignore: how big is too big?

[Vladimir Panteleev via Digitalmars-d]

On Sunday, 22 March 2015 at 16:08:38 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu 
wrote:
> On 3/22/15 3:17 AM, Vladimir Panteleev wrote:
>> I thought moving things around was also one of your pet peeves 
>> :)
>
> Yah but I'm seeing pull requests "yeah there's some more junk 
> out there, let's just add it to .gitignore". It seems to me 
> like the wrong way to address the matter at hand.

It is much easier to add a few lines to .gitignore than to fix 
the Makefile, then fix Digger, then fix my build scripts, then 
explain why the change was necessary to anyone who then complains 
that this broke their build. It is not a matter of which fix is 
better, but a matter of which is within my threshold of the 
effort I am ready to exert at the moment. If someone with a 
higher threshold and who is also bothered by the .gitignore mess 
comes along, all the better for everyone if they decide to fix 
the problem in a better way. Or do you adhere to the philosophy 
of "good enough is the enemy of better, so let's not fix anything 
unless we can fix it perfectly"?

Furthermore, I'm not sure if a "proper" fix along the lines of 
posix.mak is even possible, given the limitations of DM make.

> On Windows I'd speculate junk is even more of a problem - all 
> of it appears right there in Explorer and other GUI tools. 
> Doesn't that bother people?

My subjective answer is "yes, it is a minor nuisance, but in 
general, that's what .gitignore is for".

>> posix.mak is already sensible in that it puts everything under 
>> generated/.
>
> Yah guess who did that :o).
>
> Ionno at a higher level this is what bothers me: at work this 
> wouldn't be debated - as soon as someone noticed, there'd be 
> agreement and the matter would be looked at. I wish we had a 
> better culture on the D team as well.

One is a controlled environment. Another is an open-source 
project. I had the impression that "move fast and break things" 
does not apply to D any more.

> It looks that as soon as anything remotely debatable comes 
> around, belligerent mode is on.

I was not the one who created this thread. I was the one who 
created a pull request which improved the situation.