Subclipse SVN first commit ignore certain directories - eclipse

Question

Decided to take the jump from CVS to SVN.
I setup a new repository in subclipse for my project. When I go to 'Finish' the setup it wants to do an initial commit and presents me with a flat list of files to select the files for version controlling.
The problem is I have thousands of generated binary files I dont want to commit.
So I click on cancel because it would take me all day to go through and unselect all the unwanted files. Annoyingly when I click on a parent category for the files I want to ignore it is not recursive!
So I click cancel then go to the eclipse directory structure for the project and manually set svn:ignore on all directories I want to ignore. Then I try and do a commit again and all the files are once again presented - ignore seems to have done nothing.
Can anybody point out what I might be doing wrong?

Answer 1

For the first commit, I recommend writing a small script to delete (of course you'll have a backup) all the files that are not meant to be committed.
Afterwards, if you find you accidentally committed a file, you can
svn delete file
Upon the first checkout, copy back (or better yet, regenerate) all the binary files. This will trigger svn to notice that your local repository is out-of-sync with the remote repository.
cd <Root of local repository>
svn status
You will see lots of "to be added" items. Go to the parent directory and add in svn:ignore properties for each of the generated items.
cd build
svn propedit svn:ignore .
which will open an editor (if it doesn't, you need to set the environmental variable SVN_EDITOR to a suitable editor). Then you can add in entries that svn will know are not tracked.
(in the ignore property editor)
target
build
image*
*.o
(and so on)
Save the file, and it will be staged for the next commit. Subsequent runs of svn status will no longer show these files as "needing to be added", but they will show the directory as "needing to be committed (it's a revision on the directory)"

Answer 2

Quick Aside
So I'm not entirely certain exactly which functionality of Subclipse you were using in order to create a repo and share a project to it, I'm assuming you created like a file based repo through the eclipse SVN repo view and tried to share and then commit to it. It looks like your problem got solved but I did want to add an answer on here because I ran across this post looking for the answer to this same problem of handling initial commits even just in general with SVN and wanted to offer help to anyone else looking for the help.
Intro
To start off I would recommend not working through an IDE extension like this just for the initial commit as they can miss a lot of the options for handling opening a repo in SVN. I personally really like the command line form of SVN to work with but TortoiseSVN is a good option for a GUI.
Whether you create a local file-based repo or are connecting to an SVN server and you want better control over your first commit in an previously unversioned project here is what I've found as the best general workflow for doing so.
Create the remote folder to save to.
On command line this will be:
$> svn mkdir your-url-scheme://your-site-address.domain/path/to/repo/example-directory
Or on TortoiseSVN open your repo for browsing, right click, and select "create new folder"
This will give you a location in the SVN repo to checkout from for our next step.
Checkout in to the already started project
Make sure to use the empty, newly created folder in your repo to checkout with. SVN does not actually require a folder being checked out to to be empty, which is an important part of what makes it actually very flexible and able to subsume parts of your directory into it fairly easily if used correctly.
Now you will checkout this empty folder into the root folder of your already started project. This will add your project to the working copy of this folder without any commit being made yet. The command is:
$> svn co your-url-scheme://your-site-address.domain/path/to/repo/example-directory /your/projects/root/
"co" standing for checkout. In Tortoise svn you can right click on or in the empty repo folder and select "checkout..." and then select the project root.
Set ignores and commit
Finally, you can easily set your ignores on certain files before adding any other files to the tree using the command:
$> svn propset svn:ignore file-or-directory-to-ignore
And to add all non-ignored directories and files:
$> svn add * --force
The force is technically unnecessary in this case but ensures full recursion. You can also now do all of this in your file explorer if using TortoiseSVN or you can even use your IDE extensions to do this at this point(make sure to ignore all files you need to before mass-adding files for commit), all that's left is to make sure to commit the newly added files to the repo and you're up and running with source control :)
Added this method here simply because this method allows you to avoid any unnecessary copying of those stinky binaries that no one wants to lug around with them.