How to ignore eclipse metadata but preserve the template?

Question

I've got an ARM project in Eclipse...Actually, I'm using the STM Workbench packaging of Base-CDT-Eclipse.

I'm working with a few other guys and we're using a git server to push and pull from.

However, everyone has a little bit different setup as far as where their toolchains are, OS's, etc.

This is causing trouble, because we're git dummies, and when we push changes after working locally, we do

git add .
git commit -m "some message"
git push origin master

And when we pull changes, we just do

git pull origin master

And pray that there no one else did anything in the meantime, because we're afraid of merging differences, but that's a different story.

Anyway, this whole project has a few sub directories that include things like datasheets, Word documents, and what-not...but, it also includes the metadata for the Eclipse project. So, the last person to commit also pushes their unique settings for things like tool-chain path, preferred builder, etc. This breaks the other guys' setup and after each pull, everyone else has to manually update their project settings to fix this.

So, what files are special to Eclipse for project settings and how can I tell git to ignore these files if they already exist? They need to be available for, say, a git clone but they need to be ignored for subsequent git push's and git pull's.

Answer 1

If you need the setting file and not rename it and it's ok forsetting file need not to do version control, so there is a way by .gitignore with below steps:

1. Create a .gitignore file. touch .gitignore

2. Edit and save the .gitignore file

   .gitignore filename

3. Remove the caches from version control. git rm --cached filename

4. Commit and push

Answer 2

You can ignore those files changes locally with:

git update-index --skip-worktree -- .project
git update-index --skip-worktree -- .classpath

See: "Difference Between 'assume-unchanged' and 'skip-worktree'", it should better resist to git pull.

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Another option would be to a content filter driver which generates (automatically on git checkout) a .classpath if it does not yet exist.
That allows you to version a .classpath.tpl template, and you can keep your actual .classpath completely private (and in your .gitignore)
See this answer for more.