Question

In the current project I am working in, someone decided that binary files be checked in as part of the source tree. The binaries live in a directory beneath the sources themselves:

project/src             # Here is the location of the source code project/src/more_src    # Some more source code lives here project/src/bin         # Here are the binary files 

As you can imagine, merge conflicts happen all the time because of this. It’s quite annoying since I do not feel that any developer’s machine should be committing the binaries – this should be left to the build server.

I am a command-line user of subversion. I would like to ignore the bin directory so that when I use svn st and svn ci these directories are skipped (even if there are pending changes).

Unfortunately, I cannot use -N (non-recursive) because of the more_src directory.

How can I accomplish this?

Answer 1

edit: subversion 1.6 has been released. From the release notes:

In Subversion 1.6, the –set-depth parameter to svn update has grown a new value—exclude. This value tells Subversion to exclude the target from the working copy, immediately and until further notice. Prior to Subversion 1.6, if a directory could not easily be removed from a working copy. …

All the stuff below is obsolete now.

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You could limit the depth of the folders in your working copy in the right places so that the undesired files don’t appear as versioned files. You can’t reduce the depth in an existing working copy though.

1) Checkout a clean working copy like this (it will contain only files and empty folders in the root):

svn co –depth immediates repoURL /some/wc/path

2) Now for each folder that you DON’T want to ignore, pull in the content with

svn update --depth infinity /some/good/path 

If the folder with content to ignore is not in the root of your working copy, you can work your way down the tree gradually with repeated calls to

svn update --depth immediates /some/path/to/make/deeper 

This approach does have a disadvantage. If the files to ignore appear in your working copy through your own actions (e.g. build), they will show up in svn status as unversioned files. You can even svn add them and cause ‘file already exists’ commit errors.

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edit: Apparently you CAN reduce the depth of parts of your working copy, which is much simpler:

1. normal project checkout (or start from existing working copy)
2. delete undesired folder (normal filesystem delete, not svn rm). At this point the folder is missing and would return with all it’s evil content if you did a normal update.
3. bring back the folder with

svn update –depth empty /path/where/deleted/folder/was

Now you can do svn update of the entire project but the bad content will not return.