I made a small utility for listing the file names inside an archive file, e.g. tar, zip, etc. This comes in handy when you download some software package using the command line but you aren’t sure whether to extract it in its own folder because you don’t know what the file structure inside is.
How is it not part of the project?
It just isn’t. It has nothing to do neither with code nor with compiling. The same tier of “partness” as /etc/fstab or something.
So everyone who contributes to the project should make their own gitignore on every development machine they use to prevent committing build files, secrets ect?
I don’t understand why you say it has nothing to do with the code when it literally has nothing to do with anything BUT the code.
What is the downside you see to committing the gitignore?
You commit with add -A? Well, ok.
Usually
git add .It’s much faster, easier and less error prone to go with the blacklist approach of the gitignore file IMO.