Jay Harris is Cpt. LoadTest

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Filed under: Programming | Quick Tips

Have you ever made comments when committing in to source control that you wish you could take back? Perhaps in a rage, you entered "Jimmy's code was a pile of fermenting humus that didn't work. So I fixed it!" Now you realize that Jimmy will see it, your boss is going to see it, and you want to change the comments to something that has a bit more tact. Or maybe your reason is far less malicious: you identified a major bug that you just committed, and you would like to update the comment log to say "Don't use this revision. It has a major bug."

In Subversion, the comments can be updated long after the original commit. Log messages are just a property on the repository revision.

svn propset --revision <REVISION> --revprop <MESSAGE> <URL>
  • <REVISION> : The revision number of the target log message.
  • <MESSAGE> : The value of the new log message, wrapped in quotes if necessary.
  • <URL> : The base URL of your repository. Since this applies to a revision property, rather than a file property, only the base URL of the repository is needed, rather than a URL directly to a file.

Now your malicious revision comment can be overwritten by:

svn propset --revision 123 --revprop "Fixed issue #17" http://svnserver/myrepos/

But next time, do try to be nice to Jimmy.

Friday, 27 February 2009 16:54:45 (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)  #    Comments [1] - Trackback

Wednesday, 11 March 2009 07:35:57 (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)
Look, I'm still learning to code, so what if it isn't perfect? It's true that my last bit of code caused a small skirmish to break out in central Africa. Like that hasn't happened to you "Captain"! Just be patient, remember that stored procs solve all bad coding issues.
Jimmy
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