~bzr-pqm/bzr/bzr.dev

Controlling file registration

=============================

What does Bazaar track?

-----------------------

As explained earlier, ``bzr add`` finds and registers all the things in

and under the current directory that Bazaar thinks ought to be

version controlled. These things may be:

 * files

 * directories

 * symbolic links.

Bazaar has default rules for deciding which files are

interesting and which ones are not. You can tune those rules as

explained in `Ignoring files`_ below.

Unlike many other VCS tools, Bazaar tracks directories as first class

items. As a consequence, empty directories are correctly supported -

you don't need to create a dummy file inside a directory just to

ensure it gets tracked and included in project exports.

For symbolic links, the value of the symbolic link is tracked,

not the content of the thing the symbolic link is pointing to.

Note: Support for tracking projects-within-projects ("nested trees")

is currently under development. Please contact the Bazaar developers

if you are interested in helping develop or test this functionality.

Selective registration

----------------------

In some cases, you may want or need to explicitly nominate the things

to register rather than leave it up to Bazaar to find things. To do this,

simply provide paths as arguments to the ``add`` command like this::

  bzr add fileX dirY/

Adding a directory implicitly adds all interesting things

underneath it.

Ignoring files

--------------

Many source trees contain some files that do not need to be versioned,

such as editor backups, object or bytecode files, and built programs.  You

can simply not add them, but then they'll always crop up as unknown files.

You can also tell Bazaar to ignore these files by adding them to a file

called ``.bzrignore`` at the top of the tree.

This file contains a list of file wildcards (or "globs"), one per line.

Typical contents are like this::

    *.o

    *~

    *.tmp

    *.py[co]

If a glob contains a slash, it is matched against the whole path from the

top of the tree; otherwise it is matched against only the filename.  So

the previous example ignores files with extension ``.o`` in all

subdirectories, but this example ignores only ``config.h`` at the top level

and HTML files in ``doc/``::

    ./config.h

    doc/*.html

To get a list of which files are ignored and what pattern they matched,

use ``bzr ignored``::

    % bzr ignored

    config.h                 ./config.h

    configure.in~            *~

Note that ignore patterns are only matched against non-versioned files,

and control whether they are treated as "unknown" or "ignored".  If a file

is explicitly added, it remains versioned regardless of whether it matches

an ignore pattern.

The ``.bzrignore`` file should normally be versioned, so that new copies

of the branch see the same patterns::

    % bzr add .bzrignore

    % bzr commit -m "Add ignore patterns"

The command ``bzr ignore PATTERN`` can be used to easily add PATTERN to

the ``.bzrignore file`` (creating it if necessary and registering it to

be tracked by Bazaar).  Removing and modifying patterns are done by

directly editing the ``.bzrignore`` file.

Global ignores

--------------

There are some ignored files which are not project specific, but more user

specific. Things like editor temporary files, or personal temporary files.

Rather than add these ignores to every project, bzr supports a global

ignore file in ``~/.bazaar/ignore`` [#]_. It has the same syntax as the

per-project ignore file.

.. [#] On Windows, the users configuration files can be found in the

   application data directory. So instead of ``~/.bazaar/branch.conf``

   the configuration file can be found as:

   ``C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Application Data\Bazaar\2.0\branch.conf``.

   The same is true for ``locations.conf``, ``ignore``, and the

   ``plugins`` directory.