Committing Machine Specific Configuration Files

Question

A common scenario when I develop is that the codebase will have several config files which require machine specific settings. These files will be checked into Git and other

Answer 1

The simplest solution is to edit the file to defaults, commit it, then add it to your .gitignore. This way, developers will not accidentally commit it when doing git commit -a, but they can still commit it in the (presumably rare) case where you want to change your defaults with git add --force.

However, having a .default and .local config file is ultimately the best solution, since this allows anyone with a machine-specific configuration to change the defaults, without having to break their own configuration.