Comments on: Command Line svn:ignore a file

By: bazzany

bazzany — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 08:54:27 +0000

Thank you for the post.
It’s helped me to undertand how to ignore file(s)

By: alex

alex — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 12:55:02 +0000

Thanks:)

By: gwinn

gwinn — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 18:02:14 +0000

Thanks a lot, that’s really what i need.

By: Joseph Pecoraro

Joseph Pecoraro — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 07:12:05 +0000

@Brandon I’m a fan of Git as well, and I use it for all my personal version control as well. But, like you said, sometimes I have to work with SVN and I struggle to remember how to do basic things like this. That is kind of what motivated me to write this article originally.

Behind your question, “is it worth banging your head against a wall?”, is another more important question, “what can we learn from this?” And we can actually see by Git’s improvement in this area, that Git may have learned something from this as well. Both use “file patterns” in their ignore files, that is a developer friendly and efficient way to specify ignoring files. But the catch in SVN is that it could only be per-directory, and through magic properties. Git opened it up, no more magic. It allows per-directory files (.gitignore) and globally excluded patterns (.git/info/exclude) in easy to edit text files.

So, what did we learn? Meta-data or configuration data has to be stored somewhere. Developers know this. SVN made it unnecessarily complex to change this information. It took a very structured, generic approach, but that just got in the way. Git took a more free form approach, and it worked out very well because it is familiar to developers (dot files are common) and therefore easy to use and remember.

By: Brandon

Brandon — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 07:30:16 +0000

This is one of those things that’s SO easy in Git, and painful in Subversion. I’ve googled this before, and asked several experienced svn users, and gotten very little. So first of all: thanks for making the time I spend in svn a little less agonizing.

However, the fact that something so basic is so unclear how to do in svn suggests to me that most svn users are just getting by, by the seat of their pants. There is NO Git user who has to look this up, except for *complete* newbies. Why not switch to Git, which makes complicated things easy?

(As for me, I only use svn at work, where it is mandated.)

I’m not trying to start a flamewar over version control systems, but I have to ask: is it worth banging your head against a wall?

By: Nelson

Nelson — Tue, 18 May 2010 20:18:32 +0000

Thanks for the post, I forget to do the svn:ignore thing before the first commit of my project and Eclipse wasn’t helping at all on this…

By: Mike B

Mike B — Tue, 11 May 2010 20:48:59 +0000

Outstanding! Never seen it explained so clearly.

By: Jason H

Jason H — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 16:57:02 +0000

Thanks. Definitely helped clear that up for me!

By: Dawn Green

Dawn Green — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 15:06:40 +0000

Thank you, Joseph! Your post is concise and perfect.

By: juque

juque — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 00:42:21 +0000

And don’t forget to set the svn_editor variable:

export SVN_EDITOR=vi

Using vi editor.

By: Paul Solt

Paul Solt — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 16:02:10 +0000

Good call! I never fully understood how it work and you cleared it up.

By: Vishnu

Vishnu — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 11:45:29 +0000

Cool Info!!
I got your blog on the first click in google.

By: Command Line svn:ignore a file « Teddy Hwang

Command Line svn:ignore a file « Teddy Hwang — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 17:53:22 +0000

[...] Command Line svn:ignore a file → I always forget how to ignore file in SVN and hence, I’m booking marking this link. [...]

By: Brian Topping

Brian Topping — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 19:42:39 +0000

Thanks for the post, I took this to the next step. I wanted to add all files that matched a pattern (in the example here, project files created by IntelliJ IDEA). So I combined this with find and a new predicate that I just learned to come up with this:

find . -name ‘*.i[mpw][lrs]‘ -execdir svn propset svn:ignore {} . \;

‘execdir’ changes directory to that folder, then makes the path argument unqualified by a directory.

By: Gerard

Gerard — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 22:10:23 +0000

Very clear and very brief. Bookmarked :)

Great post!