Ask or alert the user that she is changing a specific file, which we seldom want to change (but still want in our version control).

Question

Hi,

We have an XML file which contains the settings of a tool we use. The tool is nice, but if you change some settings when using it it's quite easy to save those settings to the XML-file by mistake (you get a question, but it's easy to answer yes).

Is there a way to alert the user someway that she is commiting a change to this specific file? We want it versioned, but we also want centralized and we want the settings to be quite stable.

It's a file versioned in Windows on an NTFS partition, if that matters. Trying to set the file to "read only" doesn't seem to work (after I set it, hg st still says no changes). Any ideas?

Answer 1

If you really want to catch it during commit, you'll need to write some hooks and get your users to install those locally.

Answer 2

The way this is usually handled is to put that file in your .hgignore and to not version it. Instead, you should version a template file. i.e., config.xml.template.

That way, the only way changes will get committed to it is for someone to consciously bring those changes into the template.