.gitignore -> .stignore

[Sjlver (Jonas Wagner)]

I’m using Syncthing to synchronize several developer machines. In these cases, it’s often useful to ignore auto-generated files.

I already have lists of such files in the form of .gitignore files. However, these are not interpreted by Syncthing. This is why I created a script to update my .stignore based on the .gitignore files it finds. I’m posting the script here in the hope that it will be useful to others.

The script (sorry, new users cannot upload files…)

On that note, a question: would it be useful to have the two tools use the same format? I know it’s an incompatible change… but it feels wrong to me to have two slightly different mechanisms and file formats for essentially the same thing.

[calmh (Jakob Borg)]

The format is loosely modelled on .gitignore. Can you outline what the main incompatibilities are? Maybe it’s something we could just tweak.

[rumpelsepp (Stefan Tatschner)]

You shouldn’t sync git repos with syncthing:

Is putting a Git workspace in a synced folder really a good idea?

You can, and it’ll sync just fine, but you shouldn’t. A Git repository is not like a collection of documents. In a collection of documents, each file is mostly independent so it’s easy to “merge” when one file has changed on one device and another file on another device. A Git repository on the other hand is made up of a bunch of files that should be internally consistent with each other. “Merging” two Git repositories that have diverged cannot be done by just copying in the newest files from …

Most likely it will corrupt your repos some times…

edit: Maybe I am just offtopic here… Sry.

[calmh (Jakob Borg)]

There are legit circumstances in which to do that though, regardless of what I wrote in that post. For example, if it’s actually one way.

[Sjlver (Jonas Wagner)]

Some of the incompatibilities that I’ve found:

• When a line contains a trailing slash, git ignores the slash but matches only directories. Syncthing does not support this. A line with a trailing slash will sync the folder but ignore all files inside.
• Syncthing uses the first matching line to make a decision. On the other hand, git will include a file if a negated line comes after a matching line.
• How ** is handled is slightly different. Git is fairly strict regarding what places ** can occur; foo**bar is accepted by Syncthing but not by git.
  EDIT: also, foo/**/bar matches foo/bar in git, but not in Syncthing, it seems.
• Paths in git are relative to the .gitignore file. It is possible (and often useful) to have .gitignore files specific to a subdirectory.
• More of a philosophy difference: .gitignore files are version controlled, but .stignore files are not synced. Git has a different mechanism for unshared ignores (~/.gitignore and .git/info/exclude).

Official git documentation

[Sjlver (Jonas Wagner)]

The concern about syncing git repos is a valid one; maybe I should just exclude them all. I guess I could write another script that finds git repo folders and adds them to .stignore

In one use case, I’m using Syncthing to synchronize a folder of notes from my laptop (where I have git) to my phone (where I don’t). It is two-way, but I can do all commits from the laptop.