I use IntelliJ IDEA for portal and plugins development. Also, I currently experiment with different project configuration and, therefore, have IntelliJ module files (*.iml) everywhere. For now, I do not want to commit ignore patterns on SVN, but still want to ignore them in my changelist, to have them out of my sight.

For this purpose I use global-ignores feature of svn. This is a client feature and can be set in local configuration file located here:

windows: %APPDATA%\subversion\config 

linux: ~/.subversion/config 

global-ignores setting may look like this:

global-ignores = *.iml desktop.ini