You can go directly to the last paragraph of this post to read about my concern.

I was trying Git submodules then found the above post on Bitbucket, and it fits better my use case. The issue I had with git submodules is that my co-worker could not just pull a parent repository and just work on it without pulling explicitly the submodules also. With subtrees this complexity is gone. I can edit a shared library in any of the projects that are using it and push the commit to its remote repository. Then later in any other project that is using it I can make a pull request to have the library up-to-date. And my co-worker absolutely does not need to be aware of it for it to work.

But now I’m facing a situation that is a bit confusing, at least for me. I have a private repository for a library auth that is basically a set of helpers for authentication. I use it as a git subtree in multiple Elixir /Phoenix projects. So in my last project I have to deal multi-lingual content and I prefer that each application in the project handle the internationalization through its own Gettext backend. Then in my auth library I generate content in multiple languages for that project. But other projects that use this same library don’t necessary need those translations files.

So I’m wondering how to use .gitgnore files so that a parent git repository keep trace of a folder it generated inside a subtree repository, while the subtree repository should ignore that folder when pushing to its own remote repository. The folder in my case is the one that contains the Gettext translations. I can ignore the folder in the subtree repository, but is not it meaning that the main project repository will also follow that rule?