Ignoring Unversioned Items
Prev | Chapter 3. Advanced Topics | Next

## Ignoring Unversioned Items

In any given working copy, there is a good chance that alongside all those versioned files and directories are other files and directories that are neither versioned nor intended to be. Text editors litter directories with backup files. Software compilers generate intermediate—or even final—files that you typically wouldn't bother to version. And users themselves drop various other files and directories wherever they see fit, often in version control working copies.

It's ludicrous to expect Subversion working copies to be somehow impervious to this kind of clutter and impurity. In fact, Subversion counts it as a feature that its working copies are just typical directories, just like unversioned trees. But these not-to-be-versioned files and directories can cause some annoyance for Subversion users. For example, because the svn add and svn import commands act recursively by default and don't know which files in a given tree you do and don't wish to version, it's easy to accidentally add stuff to version control that you didn't mean to. And because svn status reports, by default, every item of interest in a working copy—including unversioned files and directories—its output can get quite noisy where many of these things exist.

So Subversion provides two ways for telling it which files you would prefer that it simply disregard. One of the ways involves the use of Subversion's runtime configuration system (see the section called “Runtime Configuration Area”), and therefore applies to all the Subversion operations that make use of that runtime configuration—generally those performed on a particular computer or by a particular user of a computer. The other way makes use of Subversion's directory property support and is more tightly bound to the versioned tree itself, and therefore affects everyone who has a working copy of that tree. Both of the mechanisms use file patterns (strings of literal and special wildcard characters used to match against filenames) to decide which files to ignore.

The Subversion runtime configuration system provides an option, `global-ignores`, whose value is a whitespace-delimited collection of file patterns. The Subversion client checks these patterns against the names of the files that are candidates for addition to version control, as well as to unversioned files that the svn status command notices. If any file's name matches one of the patterns, Subversion will basically act as if the file didn't exist at all. This is really useful for the kinds of files that you almost never want to version, such as editor backup files such as Emacs' `*~` and `.*~` files.

When found on a versioned directory, the `svn:ignore` property is expected to contain a list of newline-delimited file patterns that Subversion should use to determine ignorable objects in that same directory. These patterns do not override those found in the `global-ignores` runtime configuration option, but are instead appended to that list. And it's worth noting again that, unlike the `global-ignores` option, the patterns found in the `svn:ignore` property apply only to the directory on which that property is set, and not to any of its subdirectories. The `svn:ignore` property is a good way to tell Subversion to ignore files that are likely to be present in every user's working copy of that directory, such as compiler output or—to use an example more appropriate to this book—the HTML, PDF, or PostScript files generated as the result of a conversion of some source DocBook XML files to a more legible output format.

| Note
Subversion's support for ignorable file patterns extends only to the one-time process of adding unversioned files and directories to version control. Once an object is under Subversion's control, the ignore pattern mechanisms no longer apply to it. In other words, don't expect Subversion to avoid committing changes you've made to a versioned file simply because that file's name matches an ignore pattern—Subversion always notices all of its versioned objects.

The global list of ignore patterns tends to be more a matter of personal taste and ties more closely to a user's particular tool chain than to the details of any particular working copy's needs. So, the rest of this section will focus on the `svn:ignore` property and its uses.

Say you have the following output from svn status:

    $ svn status calc
     M      calc/button.c
    ?       calc/calculator
    ?       calc/data.c
    ?       calc/debug_log
    ?       calc/debug_log.1
    ?       calc/debug_log.2.gz
    ?       calc/debug_log.3.gz

In this example, you have made some property modifications to `button.c`, but in your working copy, you also have some unversioned files: the latest `calculator` program that you've compiled from your source code, a source file named `data.c`, and a set of debugging output logfiles. Now, you know that your build system always results in the `calculator` program being generated.[18] And you know that your test suite always leaves those debugging logfiles lying around. These facts are true for all working copies of this project, not just your own. And you know that you aren't interested in seeing those things every time you run svn status, and you are pretty sure that nobody else is interested in them either. So you use `svn propedit svn:ignore calc` to add some ignore patterns to the `calc` directory.

    $ svn propget svn:ignore calc
    calculator
    debug_log*
    $

After you've added this property, you will now have a local property modification on the `calc` directory. But notice what else is different about your svn status output:

    $ svn status
     M      calc
     M      calc/button.c
    ?       calc/data.c

Now, all that cruft is missing from the output! Your `calculator` compiled program and all those logfiles are still in your working copy; Subversion just isn't constantly reminding you that they are present and unversioned. And now with all the uninteresting noise removed from the display, you are left with more intriguing items—such as that source code file `data.c` that you probably forgot to add to version control.

Of course, this less-verbose report of your working copy status isn't the only one available. If you actually want to see the ignored files as part of the status report, you can pass the `--no-ignore` option to Subversion:

    $ svn status --no-ignore
     M      calc
     M      calc/button.c
    I       calc/calculator
    ?       calc/data.c
    I       calc/debug_log
    I       calc/debug_log.1
    I       calc/debug_log.2.gz
    I       calc/debug_log.3.gz

As mentioned earlier, the list of file patterns to ignore is also used by svn add and svn import. Both of these operations involve asking Subversion to begin managing some set of files and directories. Rather than force the user to pick and choose which files in a tree she wishes to start versioning, Subversion uses the ignore patterns—both the global and the per-directory lists—to determine which files should not be swept into the version control system as part of a larger recursive addition or import operation. And here again, you can use the `--no-ignore` option to tell Subversion to disregard its ignores list and operate on all the files and directories present.

| Tip
Even if `svn:ignore` is set, you may run into problems if you use shell wildcards in a command. Shell wildcards are expanded into an explicit list of targets before Subversion operates on them, so running `svn `SUBCOMMAND` *` is just like running `svn `SUBCOMMAND` file1 file2 file3 …`. In the case of the svn add command, this has an effect similar to passing the `--no-ignore` option. So instead of using a wildcard, use `svn add --force .` to do a bulk scheduling of unversioned things for addition. The explicit target will ensure that the current directory isn't overlooked because of being already under version control, and the `--force` option will cause Subversion to crawl through that directory, adding unversioned files while still honoring the `svn:ignore` property and `global-ignores` runtime configuration variable. Be sure to also provide the `--depth files` option to the svn add command if you don't want a fully recursive crawl for things to add.

[18] Isn't that the whole point of a build system?

Prev | Up | Next
File Portability | Home | Keyword Substitution