If I add a filename to gitignore, this will be ignored by git and will not go in the repository. What I would like to do is to have a specific file in the upstream repository, allow everybody to check it out and modify it according to their needs, but then exclude it from their commits.
Basically I would like the repository to provide a template configuration file that needs to be fine tuned depending on the development environment of each developer, but that must not be modified in the repository.