Semi-public Git repositories

elseif has not written about this yet · Frank DENIS random thoughts. describes it this way

Okay, maybe I’m just messy, but I’m sure the story below will resonate with a lot of developers. It often starts with a small file I’m not planning to commit. I’m trying something, so I write a test. Or I figure out how to deploy the project to one of my servers and put the commands in a script. It assumes my directory layout, my set of installed tools, and probably something I’ve forgotten to document, but it works for me. That’s all I need from it. Then I add some notes about things to fix or try, along with an idea for a feature that might go nowhere. None of this is ready to publish, but it belongs with the project, so I keep it in the checkout. After a while, my checkout looks pretty different from what someone gets by cloning the repository. The public code is there, along with all the little things that help me maintain it. And those little things stick around. They show up every time I run git status, until I’ve learned to ignore them without really looking. I don’t put them in .gitignore, because I don’t necessarily want to publish their names either. I don’t want someone reading a rough idea in my notes and treating it as a promise. Deployment instructions might also have