As we migrate away from Subversion, I ran into this little issue today.

Since it’s something which popped up time and time again and I never got around to figuring out why this happened in the first place, I decided to put it into a blog post.

Problem?

What I did was, I setup an svn:ignore in the root of my Subversion repository, in order to ignore modules which are installed in the app/modules structure:

My editor opened, and I put in app/modules/foo for the path I want to ignore.

Turns out this does not work:

After trying out various things like app/modules/f* and */foo, I finally figured it out:

Solution

The revalation of the day is: svn:ignore does not work recursively — like svn:externals would.

Fin

And this is after almost eight years with Subversion. I am just glad to move on.

Apologies if this is too basic or written down somewhere — I did try to read the page on svn:ignore in the documentation, but decided to spend my time on something else after the first couple paragraphs.