Why did we get rid of a .gitignore file

[HassanBahati]

@ht-thomas @kallyas we earlier had a .gitignore file that was ignoring directories like venv, though at a point this seemed to be no more.....am trying understand why we could have got rid of this

[TobiasHT5]

There are certain files that are better left in a local development environment, and that is one of them, because someone would create a fork of the project and pull files that end up messing with their environment. It's why I suggested that we leave out things like gitignore and other local environment configuration files that had started showing up in the codebase. Also, future packaging reasons, it's better to keep only the relevant files instead of adding tokens to isolate some folders and files from the distribution.
However, if there's actual need for a gitignore, we can have it back in and have a way of skipping it during building of the package

[HassanBahati]

alright, thanks for the clarity...I just needed to understand the reason behind the decision. I think for now all is well with keeping only relevant stuff and files