Subversion: svn status displays tons of undesired .metadata files

Question

I'm trying to set up Subversion on Ubuntu Linux. It seems to be working, except that when I made one change and tried svn status, I found about 100 files had been changed, in the .metadata directory.

My ~/.subversion/config file currently contains the following line:

global-ignores = *.o *.lo *.la *.al .libs *.so *.so.[0-9]* *.a *.pyc *.pyo *.rej *~ .*.swp .DS_Store 

What do I need to add to ignore the .metadata files?

The directory under consideration is used by Eclipse for Python development using PyDev, if that matters.

Answer 1

You can ignore unversioned files with status by running:

svn status --quiet

Answer 2

You could simply instruct your svn to ignore that directory entirely:

 svn propset svn:ignore path/to/.metadata

More details in this SO answer.

Note: in this case, I would recommend having your Eclipse project defined (.project, .classpath) outside the .metadata Eclipse directory.
That way, you can:

• safely ignore that .metadata tree
• be able to version (if you want) the definition of your Eclipse project in order to re-import it easily in a new workspace if you need it.

See the SO question "Do you keep your project files under version control?"