How to let Mercurial ignore every thing except *.cs file?

Question

I started a project and added it to Mercurial. But I want to take *.cs file under version control only. So I have to add bin, obj, sln, suo, _resharper folder etc to ignore pattern.

How to let Hg only monitor certain kind of file like white list? How to do that in Subversion?

Answer 1

Just add the extensions to your .hgignore file as you come across them:

syntax: glob
*.bin
*.obj

and so on. It's not a lot of work, and it documents to the rest of the world exactly what kind of files you consider unimportant for revision control.

You can even setup a global ignore file, please see the ignore entry in the [ui] section.

Trying to turn the .hgignore upside-down by using negative lookahead regular expressions and other voodoo is (in my opinion) not a good idea. It will almost surely not work and will only lead to confusion. This is because hg matches all prefixes of a give path name against the rules in .hgignore. So a file like

a/b/c.cs

will be ignored if any of

a/b/c.cs
a/b
a

is matched by a rule in your .hgignore file. In particular, this means that you cannot use a negative lookahead expression to have a/b/c.cs not-ignored -- the rule will match a/b or a.