Re: What .gitignore files do in the tarball?

On Wed, Nov 25, 2015 at 8:40 AM, Michael Paquier
<michael.paquier@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 25, 2015 at 4:36 PM, Victor Wagner <vitus@wagner.pp.ru> wrote:
>> I've noticed that source distribution archive of the postgresql contain
>> more than hundred of .gitignore files and one .gitattributes.
>>
>> Is it just a bug nobody bothered to fix, or these files can make
>> any sense outside git repository?
>
> They are harmless and do not consume that much space in a tarball, contrary
> to .git/ which has the whole history of the repository. And this behavior
> matches for example git-archive. Keeping them also has the advantage to
> allow people to deploy a tarball easily in an orphan branch of a fresh git
> repository. In a couple of companies where people can just work from
> tarballs (this exists and I know some), that's actually useful to keep them.

+1.  I see 113 files totaling 8266 bytes.  That's not much, and like
you say, they might be useful to somebody.

-- 
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company