.hgignore whole directory tree excepting one specific file

Question

Can anyone tell me the .hgignore pattern to track one specific file in a directory and to ignore everything else?

I have a "media" directory which contains a "default.png", for obvious purposes, and the rest of the directory will hold user media. We want hg to ignore everything in the media directory excepting the default file.

Answer 1

Try:

syntax: regex
^media/.*

or (leave it in the default glob and do)

media/**

and then manually hg add media/default.png.

In mercurial (unlike in CVS) you can add files that match your ignore patterns and they work fine. So ignore broadly and hg add what you want tracked.

Answer 2

syntax: regex
^media/(?!default.png$)

almost the same as John Mee's but matches to the end of the line, instead of anything that starts with default.png.

if you wanted to allow any .c file but nothing else, you could use:

^media/(?!.+\.c$)