Question

I have a git repo at the workspace level. i.e. multiple closely related Eclipse projects in one repo.

If I add .metadata to .gitignore then each time I create new branch and checkout I loose my .metadata file and therefore import all the projects manually. This is unpleasant.

Is it safe to store the .metadata file under version control? This is a multi-developer project and JDK versions and perhaps even OSs (in future) may vary. (We’re all on Ubuntu at present.)

Are there any other IDE files which shouldn’t be comitted?

Thanks,

Chris.

Answer 1

The problem is that the file and/or directory was already tracked by git before you added it to .gitignore:

• for a file, it will continue to be tracked, no matter what;
• for a directory, files present in this directory at the time you added it to .gitignore will also be tracked.

This means, among others, that if you have a file f which is untracked in branch b1 but you checkout branch b2 in which this file is tracked, git will remorselessly overwrite f.

As mentioned in the previous question, the solution to make git completely ignore such files after “the harm is done” consists of issuing git rm -r --cached and only then adding them to .gitignore. But this needs to be done branch by branch, which means you will still have the problem in the meantime.

Given your situation, you have two choices:

• if you can afford to restart “from scratch”, do so and put .metadata immediately into .gitignore — and commit that first, before even committing the rest;
• if you cannot afford that, you have no choice but a git filter-branch.

As to other files to ignore with other IDEs, I can only tell for IDEA: .idea and *.iml. No idea for others…