handyfloss

Sometimes you have files littering a svn working copy, but you don’t want to put them under version management. Often times it is impossible, or plain painful, to delete them, and having them appear in all svn status calls is uncomfortable. This can happen, for example, if you keep a repository of Python files. When a Python script is called from another script (a module, for example), a .pyc file is generated (a “compiled” version of the called .py module, that is just faster to load next time).

Clearly, you don’t want to put the .pyc files in the repository, but deleting them everytime you manage the working copy is painful. For that, you can make svn ignore some files, like e.g. .pyc files. You can do that in at least two ways: specifically for a directory, or as a general preference.

Setting ignore property on a single directory

You can set a property on any directory of a working copy, so that the chosen files in that directory will be ignored by svn. For example:

% svn propset 'svn:ignore' '*.pyc' pythonfiles/

will make svn ignore all .pyc files in the directory “pythonfiles”, but not those in other directories.

Setting ignore patterns globally

You can edit the ~/.subversion/config file, and add “*.pyc” in the line starting with "global-ignores =". For example, my such line is:

global-ignores = *.o *.lo *.la #*# .*.rej *.rej .*~ *~ .#* .DS_Store *.pyc *.swp

It works immediately, and for all the calls to svn status you do in any working copy on that machine.

I have been using Subversion for a while (after having it recommended by my colleague Thomas), and I must confess I’m a happy user. Subversion is a revision control system, designed to supersede, and replace, the (maybe) more popular CVS.

Subversion (svn) is good for much more than collaborative development, as a single person can keep track of versions of her own documents/scripts/whatever. Usually you only want the last version of whatever you work with. But whenever you find yourself saving a version somewhere else, to keep it like that even if further changes are made to the “current” version, svn is your friend. Whenever you wish you had saved an earlier version of the stuff you’re working with, you’re missing (know it or not) svn.