Using a per-user 'ignore' File for 'bitkeeper'

In many projects, a user's preferred editor or development environment (e.g. VS Code, Eclipse, kdevelop, …) creates some specific files or subdirectories inside the project directory, and these files shall not be commited to the bitkeeper project.

A common way to avoid this is to add the file patterns for these files to the ignore file of the project, namely BitKeeper/etc/ignore inside the project directory.

However, this approach has at least 2 disadvantages:

• The user has to add the same file pattern to the ignore file of each project.

• If several users work on a project with different editors, the shared ignore file has to contain all file patterns for all build environments preferred by any of the maintainers.

A simple way to avoid this is to use a personal ignore file, where the user can add the ignore patterns that are used in any bitkeeper project he's working with.

It's very easy to set this up. Just edit or create a file named ignore below the personal configuration directory, i.e. ~/.bk/ignore by default.

A cleaner way to find the real path to the personal configuration directory is to use the bk dotbk command, so the editor can be run with the following command:

nano `bk dotbk`/ignore

where nano in the example above has to be replaced by the name of your preferred text editor.

For the format of the entries in the ignore file, refer to the help displayed by the bk help ignore command.

— Martin Burnicki martin.burnicki@burnicki.net, last updated 2021-08-02