Re: What .gitignore files do in the tarball?

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.