This is a report about some inconveniences with GIT when syncronizing the .gitignore file. In this article I define the problems I had and outline the circumstances that lead to this situation.

I ran into the troubles with my co-worker Christian Siegrist when syncronizing our GIT repositories. Christian forked my repository on GITHub.com. Previously I excluded some files from the GIT index. My .gitignore file looked like this:

.DS_Store
*.fla
*.swf
*.tmproj
com/modestmaps/*
com/stamen/*
docs/*

I had to remove the modestmaps and stamen library because as soon as I committed those libraries an syntax error was traced in flash. For more details on this subject visit the getsatisfaction.com thread.

When we tried to merge our branches we recognized that the .gitignore file didn’t accomplish it’s task. Christians files that had to be excluded were suddenly on GITHub in his master repository. We ended up removing all those files manually over Terminal and the pushed the updated repository to GITHub. Now Christians origin was clean of disturbing files and he first added a new .gitignore file and then the missing files I had sendt him. After updating the online repository again our merging was succesful and finally our updates came together.

Has anyone experienced similar problems or knows what caused this problems? Any advice would be appreciated.