svn:ignore 'file' is not under version control

Question

I know that there are a quite a few questions on this out there however none of them make sense so I was hoping that someone could dumb it down for me, cause I am just not getting it.

I have a project (rails) and I want to ignore the SQLite files (among others) from the repository. I have tried adding the files and then ignoring with

$ svn propedit svn:ignore "development.sqlite3" db    
svn: 'development.sqlite3' is not under version control

$ svn propedit svn:ignore "*.sqlite3" db    
svn: '*.sqlite3' is not under version control

I have tried removing the files and trying the same, and many other combinations and I simply cannot get it to work. I dumped the current build and pulled it down again just to make sure that I was working with a clean copy of the project and no change.

I know that I am missing something, probably something simple, so if someone out there could give me a hand I would appreciate it.

thanks patrick

Answer 1

svn propedit does not take the filename on the command line. It lets you edit the property using whatever editor you have configured in your environment. You want to run

svn propedit svn:ignore db

which will open your editor, then you can add development.sqlite3 or *.sqlite3 or whatever you want to that "file". It will be changed in your working copy when you exit the editor, and will be updated in the repository the next time you commit the db directory. You can also set the value using the propset command:

svn propset svn:ignore '*.sqlite3' db

But, this only lets you set it the first time, and only to a single filename. It will overwrite any previous value of svn:ignore. If you want to ignore multiple files or patterns, you have to use propedit, so I just use that all the time.

Answer 2

have you tried?

svn delete file_or_dir_name 

and then commit