Subversion FAQ

2005 April 15 at 00:19 » Tagged as :subversion, rcs,

As the subversion documentation says, a good FAQ is a list of questions people might actually ask and not a list of questions some none geek marketeer dreamt up. These are some questions and answers based on my own experience.
Oops, I entered the wrong text when commiting my changes how do I change it?
If you don't remember the revision number for your commit, type svn info to find out then. look in the db/revprops/ folder in your subversion repository. Assuming this is at /var/subversion and your revision number is 122 the file /var/subversion/db/revprops/122 will contain the message that you typed in. You can open this file in your editor and change the message but don't edit anything else.
Can you do a stat against a specific revision?
the svn stat command certainly does not accept the -r parameter through witch you can generally tell subverison which revision you want to compare against. The simplest solution would be check out the revision of interest into a clean directory and diff against that.
How Do I revert to a very old revision?

The svn revert command, like the svn stat command does not accept the -r parameter. Fortunately the svn update command does. So instead of reverting you can actually update to an older version (now doesn't that sound like a contradiction?). But it's probably going to give you problems when you try a commit.

Another approach is to remove your current working copy and start off with a fresh checkout - of an older revision.

I try to make a branch and I get this error: svn: Commit failed (details follow): svn: Invalid change ordering: new node revision ID without delete
I usually see this error when I try to make a new branch/tag using the working copy and I have some locally modified files in the working copy. Subversion should perhaps give a different message that indicates the root cause (the local modifications). Once you commit your changes you can easily use the svn cp command to create your branch.