Add gitignore support for the Zig programming language

[timmyjose]

Reasons for making this change:

We already have linguist support for Zig, but we do not have a .gitignore template for Zig projects created under Github. This PR aims to provide support for that.

Links to documentation supporting these rule changes:

Source for .gitignore template - https://github.com/ziglang/zig/blob/master/.gitignore

Link to application or project’s homepage:
https://ziglang.org (homepage)
https://github.com/ziglang/zig/ (main repo page)

[timmyjose]

Hello, I'm just curious - is there anything blocking this PR from being merged, or is there any other reason for keeping it open?

[IridescentRose]

I'd love to see this happen

[ifreund]

None of these belong in a generic zig gitignore template, they are cmake/c++ related. Only zig-cache and zig-out should be included.

[serjan-nasredin]

Maybe also *.pdb and *.exe?

[ifreund]

no

[serjan-nasredin]

But Zig creates them when compiling...

[ifreund]

Are you using the zig build system? I assume not as if you were they would be placed in zig-out.

There is no way to know what organization projects not using the zig build system will use, so they should IMO not be handled here.

[serjan-nasredin]

The Zig build system is a project outside of the main compiler, and those who don't use this system should also be taken into account.

[ifreund]

The Zig build system is a project outside of the main compiler,

No, it's part of the main compiler, see the zig build command.

and those who don't use this system should also be taken into account.

There's no way to take them into account, as there is no standard place artifacts are stored if not using the zig build system.

[ifreund]

Anyhow, I'm not the target audience of this repo. I just add whatever files make sense to my .gitignore manually. As such, I don't really care what gets merged here personally. I am however a member of the zig core team.

[serjan-nasredin]

Hi @bdougie, please review this.

[svc-user]

This should not be merged as is. The changes does not reflect what artifacts zig build creates.

The zig build command (the built in build system that comes with Zig) only makes two directories those being zig-out containing the final libraries or binaries and the zig-cache which contains built artifacts helping to speed up subsequent builds.

The build, build-* and docgen_tmp directories in @timmyjose's PR are not standard directories when using Zig as the end
user.

The Zig .gitignore file should really be nothing but:

# This file is for zig-specific build artifacts.

zig-cache/
zig-out/

[alichraghi]

@timmyjose has not committed/commented for almost two years. i think we have to make another PR

[svc-user]

I've taken the liberty to open a new PR #3975 due to Timmy being inactive on this issue.

[timmyjose]

I've taken the liberty to open a new PR #3975 due to Timmy being inactive on this issue.

Agreed. I'm not active in the Zig community anymore. I will close this PR seeing that you've created a new PR for that. Thanks!

[timmyjose]

Closing in favour of #3975