Open Stack

On 2014-01-03 19:10:28 +0000 (+0000), Sam Harwell wrote:
> OpenStack does not have operational or administrative ownership
> over the computers used by contributors. As such, the community
> should not accept or promote any policy which suggests a
> configuration that alters the behavior of systems beyond the scope
> of a local workspace used while working with OpenStack project(s).
> Official alterations of a *global* .gitignore are completely
> unacceptable, but if certain files are not to be specified in the
> .gitignore committed with the project then a policy related to
> modifying the $GIT_DIR/info/exclude would be an acceptable
> alternative.

I really don't understand the aversion to allowing contributors to
police on their own what files they do and don't commit in a review
to an OpenStack project. It all boils down to the following
balancing act:

 * Reviewing changes to each project's .gitignore for the trashfile
   patterns of every editor and IDE known to man is a waste of
   reviewers' collective time.

 * Having to point out to contributors that they've accidentally
   added trashfiles created by their arbitrary choice of tools to a
   change in review is also a waste of reviewers' collective time.

Since there are ways for a contributor to configure their
development environment in a manner which prevents them from
inadvertently putting these files into a change for review, I feel
like it's perfectly reasonable to suggest that as an alternative. It
is just one of the many ways a contributor avoids wasting reviewer
time by neither polluting their changes nor every project's
.gitignore with details potentially relevant only to their own
personal development system and nowhere else.
-- 
Jeremy Stanley