Fixing log messages in Subversion
It turns out there is a way to fix commit messages in Subversion. I just didn't know it. James very kindly points out:
In your weblog post you talked about committing a revision to a Subversion repository with an incomplete log message. You can actually correct this in an SVN repo without too much trouble.
The log message is stored as a revision property, so you can print it with the following command:
svn propget svn:log --revprop -r N
It is possible to change the property with svn propset provided that a "pre-revprop-change" hook exists for the repository (the default hook is to disallow all changes, because they aren't versioned and you might not want to allow users to change them anyway). So if the hook allows it, and you have the full log message in a file, you could run the following:
svn propset svn:log --revprop -r N -F log-message-file
Despite this, I still think darcs unrecord is far more friendly, and it handles other cases than just fixing the message. I don't think I would bother doing all that (or finding out how to do it) with Subversion if I just got the message a bit wrong, but I use unrecord moderately often.
I guess there is a fundamental difference here between centralized and distributed VC: if there is just One Tree, you have to be more careful. If everyone is allowed to make a branch on their workstation then you can give them more freedom to make mistakes, and just refuse to take the changes back.
posted Fri 24 Sep 2004 in /software/vc/subversion | link
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