[RFC] Amend commit messages

[Martin Geisler]

Laurens Holst <laurens at grauw.nl> writes:

> Op 23-2-2011 13:18, Martin Geisler schreef:
>> Laurens Holst<laurens.nospam at grauw.nl>  writes:
>>
>>> I don’t think it’s necessary, or desirable.
>>>
>>> It doesn’t happen that often, and when it does, usually you still have
>>> the opportunity to do hg rollback or even to edit it with MQ or
>>> histedit as you said.
>>>
>>> If you’ve pushed out the changes already, then zut, so be it.
>>> Honestly, it’s really not a big deal to have a less-than-perfect
>>> commit message. Can’t change commit messages at all with SVN once
>>> you’ve committed, I think with the existing possibilities Mercurial is
>>> already a lot more powerful than that.
>> You can actually change these so-called revision properties with
>> Subversion, but it requires that the server has been configured to allow
>> it. First you enable the rev-prop-change hook
>>
>>    $ ln -s /bin/true<repo>/hooks/pre-revprop-change
>>
>> and then you can change things like the author:
>>
>>    $ svn propset --revprop -r HEAD svn:author "alice"
>>
>> Voila, mutable history in SVN!
>
> Ah I was not aware of this. (Altering history seems a bit scary when
> you don’t have a local repository to experiment in.) But either way,
> we’ve never used this at work and we survived just fine. Yes, in a few
> cases it mentions a wrong bug or revision number, or the commit
> message is unfinished — oh well, odds are that no-one will actually
> look at it anyway. I’m pretty sure this is not really commonly used
> SVN functionality?

I agree, I've not heard of anybody using this functionality much. I use
it myself in a test script where I want repeatable output from SVN, but
I hope nobody really use it apart from that :)

There is in fact a bug report for Subversion that describes how it
sometimes relies on increasing dates in the commits:

  http://subversion.tigris.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=752

-- 
Martin Geisler

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