Can I override svn: ignore individual directories?

Question

Global default ignoring for Subversion does a good job of keeping build artifacts out of version control. What if I need to distribute a compiled code directory for my build materials?

I don’t want to get my output (in, for example, /target ), and I want to continue to ignore all compiled code for most of my other projects, but only one directory (say /input ) needs to always keep track of files with the .a extension.

Is there a property that I can set in the /input directory that will make svn add pick up new .a files there without changing the global-ignores property?

Answer 1

The svn:ignore parameter is a property for each directory. It applies to this directory and adds rather than overrides the global-ignores . See Ignoring Unversioned Items in the SVN Book.

I would say that you have two viable options:

• Do not include *.a in the global-ignores , but rather set it in the svn:ignore property in directories where such files tend to appear, for example /target .
• Save *.a in the global-ignores and manually call svn add in each of the .a files you want to track. Once they are monitored by SVN, the ignore option will no longer apply to them.