ignoring folders in mercurial

Question

Caveat: I try all the posibilities listed here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/254002/how-can-i-ignore-everything-under-a-folder-in-mercurial.
None works as I hope.

I want to ignore every thing under the folder test. But not ignore srcProject\test\TestManager

I try

syntax: glob
test/**

And it ignores test and srcProject\test\TestManager

With:

syntax: regexp
^/test/

It's the same thing.

Also with:

syntax: regexp
test\\*

I have install TortoiseHG 0.4rc2 with Mercurial-626cb86a6523+tortoisehg, Python-2.5.1, PyGTK-2.10.6, GTK-2.10.11 in Windows

Answer 1

You can use zero-width negative look-ahead and look-behind assertions to specify that you want to ignore test only when it's not preceded by srcProject and not followed by TestManager:

syntax: regexp
(?<!srcProject\\)test\\(?!TestManager)

Mercurial uses Python regular expressions, so you can find more info on zero-width assertions in the Python docs: http://www.python.org/doc/2.5.1/lib/re-syntax.html

Answer 2

Try it without the slash after the caret in the regexp version.

^test/

Here's a test:

~$ mkdir hg-folder-ignore
~$ cd hg-folder-ignore
~/hg-folder-ignore$ echo '^test/' > .hgignore
~/hg-folder-ignore$ hg init
~/hg-folder-ignore$ mkdir test
~/hg-folder-ignore$ touch test/ignoreme
~/hg-folder-ignore$ mkdir -p srcProject/test/TestManager
~/hg-folder-ignore$ touch srcProject/test/TestManager/dont-ignore
~/hg-folder-ignore$ hg stat
? .hgignore
? srcProject/test/TestManager/dont-ignore

Notice that ignoreme isn't showing up and dont-ignore is.

Answer 3

Both cases worked for me (on linux and windows):

syntax: regexp
^backup/     #root folder
nbproject/   #any folder

or

syntax: glob
./backup/*   #root folder
nbproject/*  #any folder

However, it wasn't before I added a link to .hgignore file to .hgrc file in my repo:

[ui]
ignore = .hg/.hgignore

Also worth mentioning that mercurial ignores files that it is not currently tracking, which are those added before you configured it to ignore them. So, don't be put off by hg status saying some filed are M (modified) or ! (missing) in the folders that you have just added to the ignore list!