The current .gitignore file is quite verbose and old (some entries are 10 years old):

• it might not reflect the current needs of the project
• it might hide some "garbage" in the repository that can be revealed with git status command

At least one way to clean-up .gitignore is to ignore .* files, which are traditionally considered as hidden in unix-like systems, and use .gitignore exceptions to add files that need to be checked in, e.g.:

.* # ignore everything starting with a dot
!.gitignore # check in .gitignore nevertheless