Subversion svn:ignore propery doesn’t (seem) to work? [FIXED]

Friday, January 25th, 2013

Say you’re trying to set the “ignore” property on something in a subversion checkout like this:

svn propset svn:ignore "foo.pyc" .

Next you do a svn status:

M       foo.pyc

It seems it isn’t working. In order to fix this, you must remember to first:

• Remove the file from subversion and commit
• svn update all the checkouts of that repository so that the file is gone everywhere!
• Set the svn:ignore propery
• Now commit the property change, or svn status will still show it (even in the local checkout)!
• svn update all the checkouts of the repository

So:

host1$ svn rm foo.pyc && svn commit -m "Remove compiled python code"
host2$ svn update
host1$ svn propset svn:ignore "foo.pyc" .
host1$ svn commit -m "Ignore compiled python code"
host2$ svn update

If you get conflicts because you didn’t follow these steps exactly:

host2$ svn update
   C foo.pyc
host2$ svn resolve --accept working foo.pyc
host2$ svn rm foo.pyc
host2$ svn update
At revision 123

That should solve it.

If you want all your subversion problems solved, try this.