Would it be possible to keep any existing .gitignore

[stephendgilbert]

Right now, whenever a Codespace is rebuilt, it overwrites .gitignore. I have my students run a script that adds back in the files I want saved in their repo (images for their image processing assignments, pdfs, the dictionary file that is just words-although I could change that to words.txt, and the static libraries that their code links against). It seems like if updating the repo didn't rewrite .gitignore, but only appended, then my students wouldn't have to do that.