Elegant way to ignore PDF files for packages

[Bi0T1N]

Problem

Currently it's discouraged to add PDF files to packages that can be reproduced by compiling an example file.
To easily fix this once and forever, the main .gitignore file could forbid PDF files. However, this does not seem to be desired even if the rare amount of required PDF files could be forcibly added with git add --force wanted.pdf.
Another approach at the package level would be to add a .gitignore file to the package sub-directory but this results in a failing pipeline:

Error: packages/preview/iconic-salmon-svg/.gitignore: a package directory may only contain version sub-directories, not files.

Thus a .gitignore needs to be placed into every version sub-directory and at the moment this repository already contains 154 .gitignore files.

find packages/ -name .gitignore | wc -l 
154

Current state

The current state is that you would need to have a single .gitignore file in every version sub-directory which is cumbersome and prone to errors. And somehow useless, because you no longer touch the version directory after the merge to the main branch.

[bluss]

Neither elegant nor a solution, but something you can do locally is to edit your .git/info/exclude to ignore PDFs. This only affects your own checkout.

[alerque]

To easily fix this once and forever, the main .gitignore file could forbid PDF files.

This is not an easy once and forever fix. That would inhibit them being added by some clients, but it's not a fix. It would be a stop-gab, but it comes with side effects.
As has been pointed out before when this issue came up, changing anything at the top level that affects all packages at this point comes with other side effects for tooling that would change existing workflows.

In the short term there is no good/easy fix for this issue. If anything a CI job that linted submissions better and caught common problems might be in order, but even that would need some ... knobs to twiddle since sometimes PDFs are allowed.

In the long term the maintainers are well away that storing binary package releases in Git is not a sustainable solution at all. Package state could be tracked in Git, but something else has to be done about the actual package registry to be maintainable in the long term.