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anonymous claiming to be Ilia Frenkel added on 2008-12-09 23:17:26:
After the second thought I do agree with you. It is not so urgent feature. If you keep your source tree clean you should be OK without it.

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kkinnell added on 2008-12-09 17:03:54:
If you are using a shell that follows the unix conventions, dot files—files that start with a '.' character—will be ignored unless they are explicitly included.

As an example, if you have files named '.file' and '.faxes', and want to add them using globbing you'd type:

    fossil add .f*

To get all of your dot files you'd need to be a little trickier, because '.' and '..' are directory names. In bash you'd use

    fossil add .[^.]*

The point is that the dot files are being intercepted by the shell on non-Windows systems, and may be being intercepted on Windows systems—dot files are a bit problematic and you have to be careful about them.

IMHO:
The CVSIGNORE isn't actually that useful if you are not creating a new repository from a clean source tree, or not using a recursive add. Until the recursive add fix (see e02ffabcda) there wasn't any way to get fossil to add files that were not explicitly requested. You could still get unwanted files by injudicious file globbing, but that wasn't fossil's fault. Personally, I probably won't use recursive add on an 'as is' source tree. I'll clean it up until it only contains the files I want, then add them, and maybe then copy the, er, "unclean" source tree back.