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.