Not committing changes to files which are gratuitously changed by an IDE

[Rhialto]

I have I think a case that could be seen as somewhat similar to #7897 . I have a repository with "project files" in them, and the IDE to work with these (Vivado) likes to reformat them gratuitously.

Originally these files had a hand-made layout with nice comments, and Vivado rewrites them with a different layout, and in some files loses the comments. Since the changes are not functional I do not want to commit them. On the other hand, sometimes there are relevant changes (when a file is added to a project for instance). In those cases, I would revert the file to the original version with the better layout, and put in the change manually.

This doesn't seem to fit well with how jj works. I could add the files to .gitignore, but that seems too drastic: it kind of leaves the files out of sight completely. Maybe I could not even add changes explicitly any more?

[jennings]

The most satisfying answer would probably be if you could find or write a fix tool that reformats these files into a standard format. Anytime the IDE rewrites the file, just run jj fix to normalize the file again.

But, if it’s removing comments, I suspect a fix tool couldn’t completely eliminate these gratuitous changes.