How do you get the history of a file/folder property in SVN?

#!/bin/bash
# This is not a great solution, but it works for gathering the data

CURRENT_REVISION=95300
OLDEST_REVISION=93000
URL="file:///home/svn/repo/project/dir/target.c"
PROPERTY_NAME="svn:externals"

for i in `seq $OLDEST_REVISION $CURRENT_REVISION`
do
  svn -r$i propget "$PROPERTY_NAME" "$URL" | sed -e "s/^/$i\t/"
done

The best I can think of is to write a little script or app that uses the svn propget command to dump the current property value to a text file, and then walks back through the revisions dumping the property to another text file and comparing the two. As soon as it detects a change, it prints out the revision number (actually the later revision number that made the change) along with the user who committed it.

Here's an example command to dump the svn:ignore property for the dictionary directory at revision 80:

svn propget -r 80 svn:ignore dictionary

One way to get a list of when properties for a given folder has changed is:

svn log -v . |grep "   M /trunk/datacenter$" -B2

Which gives the following output:

r963 | someuser | 2013-08-26 20:32:37 +0200 (Mon, 26 Aug 2013) | 4 lines
Changed paths:
   M /trunk/datacenter
--
r908 | someotheruser | 2013-08-15 12:15:03 +0200 (Thu, 15 Aug 2013) | 1 line
Changed paths:
   M /trunk/datacenter
--
r413 | someuser | 2013-04-26 09:02:08 +0200 (Fri, 26 Apr 2013) | 1 line
Changed paths:
   M /trunk/datacenter

Then you can look at each revision to see what changed:

$ svn diff -c963

at the bottom:

...

Property changes on: .
___________________________________________________________________
Modified: svn:ignore
## -22,3 +22,5 ##

 .idea
 .classpath
+
+dev-config.groovy

Cons:

  • No way to specify which property you're interested in
  • Tedious

Note: not sure -B2 is sufficient in all cases, as the line " M /trunk/datacenter" might not be the first line

Tags:

Svn

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