> 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.
