git ignore vs. exclude vs. assume-unchanged

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I’m going to accept this emailed answer from Junio Hamano (the maintainer of Git) because I think it explains some things more lucidly than the official docs, and it can be taken as “official” advice:

The .gitignore and .git/info/exclude are the two UIs to invoke the
same mechanism. In-tree .gitignore are to be shared among project
members (i.e. everybody working on the project should consider the
paths that match the ignore pattern in there as cruft). On the other
hand, .git/info/exclude is meant for personal ignore patterns (i.e.
you, while working on the project, consider them as cruft).

Assume-unchanged should not be abused for an ignore mechanism. It is
“I know my filesystem operations are slow. I’ll promise Git that I
won’t change these paths by making them with that bit—that way, Git
does not have to check if I changed things in there every time I ask
for ‘git status’ output”. It does not mean anything other than that.
Especially, it is not a promise by Git that Git will always consider
these paths are unmodified—if Git can determine a path that is
marked as assume-unchanged has changed without incurring extra
lstat(2) cost, it reserves the right to report that the path
has been modified (as a result, “git commit -a” is free to commit that change).

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