File Name Patterns and File Sets clashing with .hgignore in Mercurial

Question

I have the following on .hgignore:

syntax: glob
*

and the following on myfiles.txt:

.zshrc                                                                                                                                     
.zprofile                                                                                                                                  
glob:.less*                                                                                                                                
glob:.emacs*/**                                                                                                                            
glob:src*/**                                                                                                                               
glob:.bash*                                                                                                                                
.inputrc                                                                                                                                   
.ssh  

If I try adding the files in myfiles.txt to the Mercurial repository using File Name patterns:

hg add listfile:myfiles.txt

or File Sets:

hg add "set: 'listfile:myfiles.txt' "

it doesn't work; Mercurial prints nothing and it doesn't add any files.

However, the two statements above work as soon as I remove * from .hgignore, which is odd, since I thought an explicit hg add should override anything on .hgignore.

Goal:

Aside from whether or not the above is expected Mercurial behavior, my goal is to have Mercurial ignore all files except those that I add explicitly from a control file such as myfiles.txt where I can use glob patterns. Is there a way to do this in Mercurial?

Update:

I'm not sure why some of the file patterns work for @smooth reggae. As @Martin said below, he was able to reproduce the behavior above, where file patterns seem to "clash" .hgignore, as they do for me (i.e. Mercurial respects .hgignore regardless of the explit hg add command).

To clarify, I am running Mercurial version 2.0.1 on Linux, and I have tried this on Red Hat and Ubuntu.

Answer 1

@intrpc, I am using TortoiseHg 2.1.3/Mercurial 1.9.2 and I was able to get a similar sample to work: I had a file called .sample and another file two levels deep foo/bar/Foo.txt; I had patterns.txt located a level above. With the same .hgignore as yours, I ran hg init and then hg add listfile:..\patterns-for-hg.txt for two cases:

1. with the patterns.txt containing

   .sample
   glob:foo/**
   

   in this case, hg status told me that Mercurial had added .sample to the repository but skipped foo/bar/Foo.txt

2. with the patterns.txt containing

   .sample
   path:foo/bar/Foo.txt
   

   in this case, hg status told me that Mercurial had added both .sample and foo/bar/Foo.txtto the repository

The behaviour in (2) above seems to make sense to me, because, Mercurial will ignore .hgignore if you invoke hg add with a full path to the file (this is the "explicit add" you are referring to).

The only explanation I can think of for the behaviour in (1) is that the glob in patterns.txt is treated like a wildcard and not an exact pattern; hence, hg add respects .hgignore and exact paths (.sample) and nothing else.

These are, of course, guesses; so any response from someone more qualified is more welcome.