Re: .cvsignore file being ignored...

[Greg A. Woods]

[ On Wednesday, June 4, 2003 at 13:04:30 (-0700), Peschko, Edward wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: .cvsignore file being ignored...
>
> I disagree. If I say 'cvs add * in a directory, I surely don't want to
> pick up extra files, like vim's .swp, and ~ files, or maybe .bak
> files, or whatever.

Regardless that's the way it pretty much "must" work at this point.

If you don't want to explicitly add all the files then do not use any
wildcard pattern that expands to any name you don't want to explicitly
add!

I hope you do realize that wildcard expansion is done by the shell, not
the utility -- the invoked progam never sees any wildcard expression,
just the resulting list of files.

I hope you also know you can "cvs rm" all the files you had not intended
to add before you commit and you'll know for sure that you've added
files you didn't want to add at any time you see the list of new files
to be committed (e.g. with "cvs -nq update").  It is extremely trivial
to deal with any accidental "cvs add".


> If I *wanted* to pick up a file like this, there
> should be an option, like '--force'.

That would be minutely better than your next suggestion, but it's still
really very unnecessary and would seriously break backward compatability
of the command-line user interface.

(Note too that "cvs rm *" and "cvs rm -f" have VERY different
consequences and thus they started out with a much different interface
behaviour.)

> Perhaps there should be another file called '.cvsblock' that filters
> files on the client side?

Then who gets to mediate between that and the existing .cvsignore list?

You can't have it both ways and it's far too late to change this kind of
arbitrary UI decision in CVS now.

You could try to write a wrapper for yourself that inverts the sense of
things, by scanning through the ignore list and through the command-line
list of flies, filtering out those from the command-line that match the
ignore list unless "--force" was turned on, but such a thing would have
to forever remain an easily distinguished wrapper to the existing
command-line UI since other tools and users will always expect the
existing UI.

-- 
                                                                Greg A. Woods

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