Why does .hgignore appears in my patches?

Question

I use Mercurial Queues to work with patches.

There was no .hgignore initially. I'm not sure if I first created an MQ patch and then created my .hgignore or the other way round.

(By "creating a patch" I mean hg qnew patch_name -m "...")

Anyway, I made some changes to .hgignore after I created the MQ patch.

When I did hg qrefresh; hg export qtip I got the changed contents of .hgignore also in my patch. So, tried adding an .hgignore entry to .hgignore itself. But that didn't work. The changes persisted.

So, I tried hg forget .hgignore and this made a bigger mess. It nows shows that I deleted .hgignore in my patch. Like so:

--- a/.hgignore
+++ /dev/null
- all 
- the lines of .hgignore
- the lines of .hgignore

How do I resolve this problem? I just want .hgignore to be part of my local repo and help in not tracking some files.

Answer 1

.hgignore is designed to be tracked by Mercurial (doc). The standard way to ignore files in local clone only is to use ui.ignore setting:

# .hg/hgrc
[ui]
ignore = /path/to/repo/.hg/hgignore

If you have multiple local ignore files then you can write

[ui]
ignore.first = /path/to/repo/.hg/firstignore
ignore.second = /path/to/repo/.hg/secondignore

Additional global ignore files can be configured in this way:

[ui]
ignore.first = /path/to/repo/.hg/firstignore
ignore.second = /path/to/repo/.hg/secondignore
ignore.third = ~/thirdignore

All settings live in hgrc file. More details here:

• hgrc file location: doc
• ui.ignore setting reference: doc
• about .hgignore files: doc
• original recipe: Tips And Tricks