I understand the use of the lockfile, but I am curious if you explain the reason for the poetry toml file and if this is related? #3853

So Poetry is a general tool (like npm, yarn, cargo, etc.) and relies on a couple of files:

• pyproject.toml specifies the project's dependencies (among other project-specific things)
• poetry.toml specifies general configuration options (and is not typically stored in the project, but instead belong in the user's config directory such as $XDG_CONFIG_HOME
• poetry.lock which contains the specific versions of dependencies installed by Poetry in order to be able to reproduce an installation exactly (specifically, it contains exact versions and hashes which is in contrast to pyproject.toml which will contain dependency ranges).

Now to address the question on whether poetry.toml should be included or not into .gitignore, I am leaning towards a 'yes' on this. Of the available settings, all of them are clearly user specific instead of project specific with the exception of repositories.<name> which allows for alternative repositories to be specified (e.g. private ones). Having said that, there is an equivalent option with pyproject.toml and that file is definitely project specific thus I do not see why one would prefer poetry.toml over pyproject.toml for this setting and arguably, one should discourage using poetry.toml for this as pyproject.toml is intended to be agnostic of which tool is being used.