you can add .gitignore to .gitignore ;)

True! But a gotcha there is that if your repo does have a .gitignore in the tree then this trick won't work. I had a coworker try to do just that and we were all pretty confused when his changes kept getting committed. `git add ./` will stage changes to any file in the commit tree, even if that file matches a line in gitignore.

In fact tup does exactly that to the .gitignores it generates.

yes, that works perfectly