I have setup a local git on my machine. When I initialized git, I added pre-compiled libs and binaries. However, now during my development I don't want to check in those files intermittently. I dont want to remove these files from repo. Is there any way to not keep a track of these files till I complete my development. (I think I can not use .gitignore as it works only for those files which are not in git. I want to temporarily disable tracking of files.)
9 Answers
An alternative to assume-unchanged is skip-worktree. The latter has a different meaning, something like "Git should not track this file. Developers can, and are encouraged, to make local changes."
In your situation where you do not wish to track changes to (typically large) build files, assume-unchanged is a good choice.
In the situation where the file should have default contents and the developer is free to modify the file locally, but should not check their local changes back to the remote repo, skip-worktree is a better choice.
Another elegant option is to have a default file in the repo. Say the filename is BuildConfig.Default.cfg. The developer is expected to rename this locally to BuildConfig.cfg and they can make whatever local changes they need. Now add BuildConfig.cfg to .gitignore so the file is untracked.
See this question which has some nice background information in the accepted answer.
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