Question

There are situations where as part of development environment setup, certain files are distributed with default settings and these files are checked in to svn. But we do not want the users to commit local modifications to these files accidentally.

Is there a way possible in svn to do this? I am aware that svn:ignore does not work on files that are already checked in. Or is there a different practice to achieve the same results?

Answer 1

The usual approach is completely omit such file (via svn:ignore) and commit a template instead. The user is expected to copy the template and tweak the copy to his liking:

http://subversion.apache.org/faq.html#ignore-commit

I have a file in my project that every developer must change, but I don’t want those local mods to ever be committed. How can I make ‘svn commit’ ignore the file?

The answer is: don’t put that file under version control. Instead, put
a template of the file under version control, something like
“file.tmpl”.

Then, after the initial ‘svn checkout’, have your users (or your build
system) do a normal OS copy of the template to the proper filename,
and have users customize the copy. The file is unversioned, so it will
never be committed. And if you wish, you can add the file to its
parent directory’s svn:ignore property, so it doesn’t show up as ‘?’
in the ‘svn status’ command.