It looks like that function is unused. It was added for gitignore support eadead6 which has been rewritten several times over the years. We use git itself to track ignored now, rather than reading the .gitignore file.

Have you got a use case that uses this function? Maybe a recipe or extension plugin?

I reckon we should just delete this function.

It looks like that function is unused.

I'm not overly familiar with the codebase, I was just perusing GitHub for the status quo on reading from a file and noticed this bug. I could've sworn I did a ripgrep on the codebase first and found several references, but maybe I was out of it and mindlessly searched for a different pattern.

Have you got a use case that uses this function? Maybe a recipe or extension plugin?

No, and anything of the sort I feel can just roll their own similarly written function.

I reckon we should just delete this function.

Probably, the entire file it's in seems to be using the deprecated vim.loop which will need to be thought about (with regards to minimum-supported Neovim version), too.