The Many Flavors of Ignore Files

22 points by fanf

ptman

The git innovation seems to be looking in specifically named file by default. But e.g. rsync has --exclude-from with its own "PATTERN MATCHING RULES" https://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/resolute/en/man1/rsync.1.html

fanf

It isn’t git’s innovation: version control systems have had similar ignore files for more than a decade before git came along. I used .cvsignore back in the 1990s; I guess proprietary version control systems had them even earlier. (The article has been updated to mention some of the pre-git history after I made a similar comment on fedi.)

I wondered when other tools started using VCS ignore files. I think one of the first was ack, which spawned ag, after which rg / ripgrep models its UI. But I couldn’t find any records of the early releases of ack: the early version control history is lost, the changelog is truncated, CPAN doesn’t keep very old versions. It’s from some time before 2006 but I don’t know if ack predates git or when it started using ignore files.
- ptman
  
  Of course you're right. I've used them myself. But i forgot since .cvsignore wasn't listed
masklinn

.ignore […] for ripgrep and the silver searcher

.ignore is intended as a cross-tool standard (aka what .gitignore has become without being wedded to git), afaik it is also supported by ast-grep, fd, … (jellyfin as well with the plot twist that an empty .ignore causes jellyfin to ignore the directory it’s in).
- andrewnez
  
  Good to know, it wasn’t that clear from the readme of the ignore crate that it was designed to be so broadly used
  - masklinn
    
    That it was built into a crate (and part of the standard filters) kinda hinted at it: given the silver searcher is in C it wouldn't have been a user of the crate.