Revision history [back]

Every version control system can be instructed to ignore certain files or directories, so that they are never committed to the repository. Usually, this is a special file that contains a list of ignored names, one per line.

For Git, write those file names to a file named .gitignore (don't forget the leading dot). For CVS and Mercurial, the file is called .cvsignore and .hgignore respectively. Subversion is a bit special, because it stores this information in a "property" called svn:ignore. You can edit this property with the command

EDITOR=gedit svn propedit svn:ignore /path/to/my/workingcopy

For ROS packages, I usually end up ignoring the following files:

build
bin
cmake_install.cmake
lib
msg_gen
srv_gen

Of course, this does not remove files from the repository which are already checked in; you will have to do this manually.