Over time a number of the developers have committed files that were then added to the .hgignore. From what I hear there is no way to remove items from the history of mercurial, which is ok. But I also heard that there is a way to do a clone, I think using the convert plugin, to clone/export a repo while specifying which files to not include in the conversion.
I can't help but think that someone out there has a script that does this export/filter/convert using the patterns from the .hgignore file.
Has anyone created such a beast?
You could create a filemap from .hgignore doing something like this:
hg clone -U yourrepo temprepo # create a temp repo with no files in working dir
cd tmprepo
hg revert --all # put files in working dir
hg forget ** # un-add the files
hg status --ignored --no-status | sed 's/^/exclude /' > ../filemap
that will get you a filemap you can pass into hg convert that removes all the added files that would be ignored given your .hgignore.
Do understand though, that running convert creates a whole new repo that is unrelated to your previous repo. All existing clones will be unusable with the new one. It's not normally worth it.