I’m working on a project analyzing publicly available Jupyter notebooks (https://github.com/jennalandy/notebook-research), and I found that 18% of all notebooks on GitHub are a part of ipynb_checkpoints. It’s likely that most of the users didn’t intentionally commit their checkpoints or didn’t know checkpoints were even in the directory. Since it’s clearly affecting a lot of users, it might be worth investigating how to make it more difficult for users to commit ipynb_checkpoints (as in, it should only happen if it’s the user’s intention).
Possibly create/add to a .gitignore file whenever .ipynb_checkpoints is made in a git repository? Could be incorporated into the git extension.