Comments on: .hgignore for Mac OS X applications

By: Christopher

Christopher — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 08:55:28 +0000

Hah, I can't believe that was it! It never occurred to me that the reason the files weren't being ignored is because I had already added them to version control. Anyway, I removed them from being versioned and the ignore file worked like a charm. Thanks so much for your help, I really appreciate it. Oh, and thanks as well for the original article, it's been a lot of help in getting me up and running with Mercurial as my version control software for Cocoa development.

Cheers,

Christopher

By: Peter Hosey

Peter Hosey — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 04:40:52 +0000

Indeed I did; sorry.

Are the files already versioned? hg won't ignore files you've told it to track, only files you haven't. What does hg status or hg log say about them?

Also, note that, unlike Git, hg requires the .hgignore file to be in the top level. You can't put it in subdirectories like you can with Git.

By: Christopher

Christopher — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 04:34:04 +0000

Hi Peter,

I think you misunderstood my question. I was asking why Mercurial was not working with the .hgignore file that you have above. Currently, I use Git for Xcode projects and Mercurial for everything else, and I am trying to switch over to Mercurial for Xcode projects as well, but the .hgignore files do not seem to work properly. I tried your file above, and it works for everything but the last three file types. I was wondering why Mercurial would seem to selectively ignore a few of the lines in the .hgignore file but not others. Have you run into any problems with Mercurial not obeying everything in its .hgignore files?

Thanks again.

By: Peter Hosey

Peter Hosey — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 04:11:38 +0000

I don't use Git. It has a manpage describing its ignore format. You might try removing the “syntax: glob” line, which is hg-specific.

By: Christopher

Christopher — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 03:58:06 +0000

Hi Peter, I don't know if you are still answering comments to this post, but if so, I'd like to point out that I am using your .hgignore template above for my Xcode project and the portion that should block *.pbxuser, *.perspective, and *.perspectivev3 files doesn't seem to work for me. I'm actually using Git for my versioning needs right now, but I find Mercurial to be simpler and I would like to use it instead if possible, but this problem is really going to keep me from moving over to it. Any ideas/suggestions on why the ignore file wouldn't work for just those particular files? Thanks for your help.

By: Peter Hosey

Peter Hosey — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 17:11:57 +0000

Till: Read Andrew's comment, and use a regex pattern:

syntax: regexp

.*/te?mp/.*

By: Till

Till — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 18:40:35 +0000

I would like to use only one ignore file: ~/.hgignore. But then again I'd like it to ignore all files that have a tmp or temp soewhere within there path. Any idea how to achieve this?

By: Peter Hosey

Peter Hosey — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 18:46:14 +0000

Andrew: Sure, but then each developer has to repeat that process. If you version .hgignore instead, they get its benefits automatically, from the moment they clone your repository.

Of course, this way, you have to do it for each new project. It's a trade-off. I think this way results in less work over the long term.

By: Andrew

Andrew — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 18:34:23 +0000

According to hgrc(5), you can put

[ui]
ignore = ~/.htignore

in your ~/.hgrc, and have this apply to all of your projects automatically.

By: Peter Hosey

Peter Hosey — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 18:37:57 +0000

Mark: Having a .hgignore doesn't prevent you from versioning files that match an ignore pattern. If you have a default.pbxuser that you want to version, go right ahead and do that—nothing's stopping you. As for .perspectivev3: Yup, you're right. I'm still developing primarily on Tiger, so I forgot about that. I'll update the file and the post with it.

By: Mark Grimes

Mark Grimes — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 18:05:05 +0000

I use git, so not sure if syntax is the same but you might want to exclude default.pbxuser from your all inclusive *.pbxuser
Also shouldn't it be *.perspectivev3 these days?