add status.showUntrackedFiles=all to system config

[shiftkey]

Desktop received a report about our use of git status interfering with a user's preferred config: desktop/desktop#3734

I looked at the behaviour of git status and it doesn't seem to support a way for Desktop to receive all untracked file paths (the current behaviour) or hide untracked files (if status.showUntrackedFiles=no is set). The defaults favour the normal mode which is great for the CLI experience, but not great for apps.

We already have the ability to ship system configuration changes like this and I think, from an application perspective, setting status.showUntrackedFiles=all is a reasonable default behaviour - applications don't really get much use out of the "normal" view if they want to look at untracked files.

[joshaber]

We already have the ability to ship system configuration changes like this

It looks like that's just for Windows? Can we do it across all platforms?

[shiftkey]

The same trick should work for the other platforms, we just haven't had to do that yet...

[mpietras]

still not in system config is appears - just tried status.showUntrackedFiles=no with 2.7.1...

[guy-rouillier]

I found this via search. I'm not sure I'm doing this right, but in my repository .git directory, I specified:

git config --local status.showUntrackedFiles no

which added the following to the .git/config file:

[status]
        showUntrackedFiles = no

If that's the correct thing to do, then this isn't working in Linux build 3.2.7. I can, however, manually exclude file patterns in the .gitignore file. I mostly want to ignore build-generated binary files.