Mercurial in Windows doesn't see .hgignore - why?

Question

Windows fails to pick up my .hgignore file. I'm running Mercurial from the command line, and "hg status" shows lots of files in the ignored directories.

The .hgignore file looks like this (there's no whitespace at the start of the file, or at the start of each line). I've put it in the root directory of the repository.

\.pyc$
\.pyo$
\.DS_Store
\.Python
\.installed.cfg
^bin$
^build$
^develop-eggs$
^eggs$
^include$
^lib$
^parts$
^pip-log.txt$
^web/localsettings.py$

I've tried saving the file in ANSI and UTF-8, and it doesn't seem to make a difference.

I know the file is working OK on Linux, is there anything different about the paths in Windows?

Answer 1

"hg status" shows lots of files in the ignored directories

Are you referring to .DS_Store and .Python exclusively? The rule for ^bin$ will only ignore entries with that exact string. It will not, for example, ignore "bin/a.out".

The only other thing I could think of is if there is some global setting that sets the syntax to glob (as opposed to the default of regex) hiding somewhere. I'm not aware of any such thing, and it certainly isn't on by default if installing an official binary version of Mercurial.

Answer 2

If the .hgignore file is in your user profile directory (%userprofile%/.hgignore), then edit your mercurial.ini (which should also be in your user profile folder) to have this:

[ui]
ignore = %USERPROFILE%/.hgignore

That will cause hg to recognize and use your .hgignore file. The .hgignore file in your user profile directory will affect hg's behavior for all repositories. If you want to have specific per-repository settings, you should be able to put .hgignore files in the root of each repository.