Autogenerated HTML docs for v1.5.5-rc1-22-g17689

1 files changed, 12 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/gitignore.txt b/gitignore.txt
index e847b3ba6..613dca006 100644
--- a/gitignore.txt
+++ b/gitignore.txt
@@ -38,6 +38,18 @@ precedence, the last matching pattern decides the outcome):
  * Patterns read from the file specified by the configuration
    variable 'core.excludesfile'.
 
+Which file to place a pattern in depends on how the pattern is meant to
+be used. Patterns which should be version-controlled and distributed to
+other repositories via clone (i.e., files that all developers will want
+to ignore) should go into a `.gitignore` file. Patterns which are
+specific to a particular repository but which do not need to be shared
+with other related repositories (e.g., auxiliary files that live inside
+the repository but are specific to one user's workflow) should go into
+the `$GIT_DIR/info/exclude` file.  Patterns which a user wants git to
+ignore in all situations (e.g., backup or temporary files generated by
+the user's editor of choice) generally go into a file specified by
+`core.excludesfile` in the user's `~/.gitconfig`.
+
 The underlying git plumbing tools, such as
 linkgit:git-ls-files[1] and linkgit:git-read-tree[1], read
 `gitignore` patterns specified by command-line options, or from