why does Laravel 4 gitignore composer.lock

Question

Why does the default laravel4 have the composer.lock file included in the .gitignore repo?

It seems to contradict composers recommendations to commit this file into VCS. I was wondering if there was something I didn't know that justified this?

Answer 1

According to the author of Laravel here https://github.com/laravel/framework/issues/1412:

It is recommended for your own apps, not for frameworks.

Answer 2

It's not clear from the question if you meant the framework or the app. Instead of asking for a clarification, I decided to write this instead for future confused users.

The problem is, it's ignored not only in the framework but in the app too. The app is what you get when you install Laravel as a project (i.e. not for the purposes of developing it and sending pull requests but for using it in a project of yours).

In contrast, the Symfony project makes a distinction here and doesn't include the lock file in the .gitignore of the the Symfony Standard Edition distribution (the app) unlike the Symfony framework.

There are already at least two issues and one pull request regarding composer.lock: issue 1696, issue 2293 and PR 2591.