> Is editing the global-ignores setting in the Subversion configuration file,
> as already suggested by Thorsten in an earlier post, not an option?
>
> That's currently the only unversioned place where ignore settings can
> be configured. See http://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.7/svn.advanced.confarea.html#svn.advanced.confarea.opts.config
>
> Can the build system output its files into a subdirectory with a known
> name which can then be ignored?
A large part of the automatically-generated files contain source-code
for language binding (Lua to C, Java to C and others). The system
generates these files with .c/.cpp/.h extensions (so they can't be
ignored based on the extension), but it does not enforce any
convention on their names or on which directory they should go, this
is freely configurable in custom project configuration files. This
means that right now there is no global pattern that could be used in
the global-ignores subversion setting.
Now, we _could_ change the system and make it enforce a known
subdirectory and/or some naming convention for all the
automatically-generated source files. The problem is that, since we
are talking about actual source code files and even exported headers
(possibly used by developers in other dev teams), this would also
require a through verification in all #includes (maybe only
includepaths, not sure if it would be enough though) that reference
such files in all the code in our repository (and possibly those of
other dev teams). It seems a big trouble to go through just because of
SVN property modifications.
> It seems your use case is rather exceptional. I've rarely seen the need
> to ignore arbitrary files with names that aren't known in advance.
> However, it's clear that the current ignore system isn't well suited
> for this case, so maybe we should extend Subversion in some way to
> account for this.
The simplest and cleanest way I see to extend Subversion to account
for this is to provide another special property, say svn:localignore,
that would work exactly like svn:ignore, but that would be
unversioned, so that it could be altered by automation systems like
ours without making directories be marked as modified.
Thanks for your suggestions, Thorsten Schöning, Bob Archer and Stefan
Sperling. I'm still deciding the best way to avoid the problem on our
side, and I'm still listening to other suggestions as well, but so far
I still believe that an unversioned ignore property (or something like
that) would be a useful (and harmless) addition to Subversion. I have
seen similar feature requests (based on different scenarios) be
rejected, though, so I will wait a little longer before I make a new
official request.
Received on 2012-10-30 16:58:24 CET