How to permanently prevent specific part of a file from being committed in git?

Question

I have cloned a remote SVN repository with git-svn. I have modified a pom.xml file in this cloned repo in a way that the code compiles. This setup is exclusive for me. Thus

Answer 1

One general way to share this kind of configuration file is :

1. commit a template file (e.g : pom.xml.template)
2. ignore the file itself (e.g : add pom.xml to the .gitignore file)
3. have every user customize this file to suit his needs

Some ways to implement step 3. are :

• have the user manually edit copy the template file and edit it
• have some script, which applies a substitution on the template file and write the output to the expected target