bzr ignore --unknown could ignore all untracked files

[Daniel Clemente]

Some processes create many temporary files which you want ignored. For instance, initialize a branch and add some C source code. Configure and run Makefile, and you have many generated and output files which you can safely ignore. You have already tracked the important files, and all the rest is unwanted.

Since ignoring the unknown files is a common operation, a new option --unknown to the command „ignore“ could do this automatically. Then you could just run „bzr ignore --unknown“ and it would write in .bzrignore each file which was listed under „unknown“ in „bzr status“.

Otherwise you must add each file by hand (with copy+paste) or find patterns that match all files seen in „bzr status“.

bazaar 1.14dev, 4253

[Robert Collins (lifeless)]

On Sun, 2009-04-05 at 22:50 +0000, Daniel Clemente wrote:
>
>
> Since ignoring the unknown files is a common operation, a new option
> --unknown to the command „ignore“ could do this automatically. Then
> you could just run „bzr ignore --unknown“ and it would write
> in .bzrignore each file which was listed under „unknown“ in „bzr
> status“.
>
> Otherwise you must add each file by hand (with copy+paste) or find
> patterns that match all files seen in „bzr status“.

bzr ignore $(bzr unknowns) should do this for you. Adding an option to
do it would make this more discoverable and accessible on non-unix
platforms.

-Rob