Ignore changes to files that are already in repository

Question

Adding files to .hgignore will prevent them from being tracked. But we have some files that we want to be in the repository - we just don't want users to ever commit changes. Is there a way to ignore changes to these files, so they won't get committed in an hg commit.

Answer 1

That cannot be done in Mercurial — a file is either tracked or untracked (and then optionally ignored). You should instead version a template file and then ignore the real file.

So add config.template to version control and add config to .hgignore. Ask your developers to copy the template to the real name and customize it as needed.