I'm using git behind svn, and for each branch I have, I need to do a full build (which takes a few minutes). These build files should NOT be checked in, but they are intermingled with user-modified files, which means I cannot just exclude the directory. The user-modified files are likely to change, also, which means I can't make special rules for just those files.
Is there a way to maintain a set of non-checked-in files in git in each branch? What are my options?
If there is a clear naming convention (which can vary per branch), you could have a different .gitignore per branch, with the right rules in order to exclude those build files within a directory.
You can combine that with a merge driver to preserve those .gitignore content during merges between branches.
If you setup gitignore to ignore all files, then git will never prompt you to add new files to your repo. However, any files checked-in will be treated as normal tracked files.
PROJECT_ROOT/.gitignore:
*
You can then add new files with git add -f FILENAME
This doesn't directly answer your question, but if repairing your build process is an option, a standard approach is to put build-generated files in a completely separate directory ... it avoids headaches like this and makes 'clean' actions simpler as well.
