* Sébastien Villemot <sebastien@debian.org> [2021-08-07 12:09]:
Having restored the .gitignore of octave, I realize that it
excludes only files that are under debian/ (with the exception
of backup files *~, which could arguably also be changed to
debian/*~). So this particular .gitignore file could actually be
moved to debian/.gitignore, and we would no longer need
merge-mode=merge.
So do we really want to ignore files in the top-level directory?
I think that ignoring files in the top-level directory is just a
convenience for avoiding spurious warning and error messages in
"gbp pull" and "git status" in a post-build package directory.
This can be avoided by running :
./debian/rules clean ; quilt pop -af
After this, if there are are still files left outside the debian/
directory, then they should be included in debian/clean.
We could enforce this discipline. In this case, we can move the
top-level .gitignore into debian/.gitignore, remove the lines
related to the upstream files, and also do not add the
merge-mode=merge line in debian/gbp.conf.
What do you think?