Here's the current contents of the .gitignore file for the Go project.

.DS_Store
*.[56789ao]
*.a[56789o]
*.so
*.pyc
._*
.nfs.*
[56789a].out
*~
*.orig
*.rej
*.exe
.*.swp
core
*.cgo*.go
*.cgo*.c
_cgo_*
_obj
_test
_testmain.go

/VERSION.cache
/bin/
/build.out
/doc/articles/wiki/*.bin
/goinstall.log
/last-change
/misc/cgo/life/run.out
/misc/cgo/stdio/run.out
/misc/cgo/testso/main
/pkg/
/src/*.*/
/src/cmd/cgo/zdefaultcc.go
/src/cmd/go/internal/cfg/zdefaultcc.go
/src/cmd/go/internal/cfg/zosarch.go
/src/cmd/internal/objabi/zbootstrap.go
/src/go/build/zcgo.go
/src/go/doc/headscan
/src/runtime/internal/sys/zversion.go
/src/unicode/maketables
/test.out
/test/garbage/*.out
/test/pass.out
/test/run.out
/test/times.out

# IntelliJ-based editors
/.idea/

Many of those, like .idea and .DS_Store, are not specific to the Go project - they're specific to a user's environment or to an OS. There are large number of user-specific files that get placed in directories that we might need to exclude; we can't enumerate the list, and it also seems useful to teach users how to solve this problem for themselves.

Git has a tool for dealing with files you'd like to (privately) ignore. You can edit the .git/info/exclude file to privately ignore any files you don't want to commit to the project. You can also create a global .gitignore file for your computer to ignore those files in every Git repository on your machine, described here: https://help.github.com/articles/ignoring-files/#create-a-global-gitignore.

Finally, you can create a Git template to automatically populate the contents of .gitignore whenever a new Git repository is created, as described here: https://stackoverflow.com/a/16658321/329700

I'd like to propose that we put the above instructions in the .gitignore file and then remove all of the user and OS-specific ignore directives; the ignore file should only include artifacts that are generated by the Go project that we'd rather not check in.