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Category: SVN

How to Determine Contained Revisions in an Subversion Dump File

July 7, 2015 by Roland·0 Comments

The utility svnrdump allows you to dump and load Subversion repositories, including the whole revision history.

A typical use case for svnrdump looks like this:

svnrdump dump <OLD-REPOSITORY-URL>  > my-repository.dump
svnrdump load <NEW-REPOSITORY-URL> < my-reposiotory.dump

1 2	svnrdump dump <OLD-REPOSITORY-URL> > my-repository.dump svnrdump load <NEW-REPOSITORY-URL> < my-reposiotory.dump

To find out which revisions a particular dump file contains, grep comes in handy: The contained revision numbers are stored in plain text and in increasing order in the dump file.

grep -a "Revision-number:" my-repository.dump

1	grep -a "Revision-number:" my-repository.dump

returns all stored revisions. To find out the first or last contained revision, simply use head and tail:

grep -a "Revision-number:" my-repository.dump | head -n 1
grep -a "Revision-number:" my-repository.dump | tail -n 1

1 2	grep -a "Revision-number:" my-repository.dump \| head -n 1 grep -a "Revision-number:" my-repository.dump \| tail -n 1

The use of SVN keywords

May 1, 2013 by Roland·0 Comments

The version control system Subversion offers a nice feature called keywords. Keywords are a mechanism which allows to replace certain markers/placeholders in versioned text files with SVN metadata (author, last modified date, last modified revision, etc.). By default, keywords are disabled and may be activated with a specific SVN property called svn:keywords. The corresponding chapter in the SVN book lists the available Keywords.

Keywords (in the example, the last modified date and revision) may either be activated for a single file:

svn propset svn:keywords "Date Revision" testfile.txt

1	svn propset svn:keywords "Date Revision" testfile.txt

or for a whole directory tree

svn propset svn:keywords "Date Revision" -R .

1	svn propset svn:keywords "Date Revision" -R .

As of the next commit of the files, all occurrences of $Date$ and $Revision$ placeholders will be updated with the up-to-date metadata every time you commit the file:

$Date: 2013-05-01 10:08:40 +0200 (Wed, 01 May 2013) $
$Revision: 11 $

1 2	$Date: 2013-05-01 10:08:40 +0200 (Wed, 01 May 2013) $ $Revision: 11 $

If you want to disable all keywords for a file/tree you use the propdel command:

svn propdel svn:keywords testfile.txt
svn propdel svn:keywords -R .

1 2	svn propdel svn:keywords testfile.txt svn propdel svn:keywords -R .

For disabling certain keywords there exists the propedit command which fires up a text editor:

svn propedit svn:keywords testfile.tx

1	svn propedit svn:keywords testfile.tx

Note that propedit only works for a single file/directory and has, by nature, no recursive option. A recursive alternative is to use propset svn:keywords -R with a new list of SVN keywords.

The following is a list of my favorite keywords:

Keyword\|	Placeholder\|	Example
Date	$Date$	$Date: 2013-05-01 10:08:40 +0200 (Wed, 01 May 2013) $
Revision	$Revision$	$Revision: 11 $
Author	$Author$	$Revision: svenlogan $

Category: SVN

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