Re: [Issue 2206] RFE: Changed #/lines information in svn log -v

Adrian Robert wrote:

> It's a quick way to determine the rough magnitude of changes that went
> into a certain revision. This is useful in general for finding out the
> amount of work/change has gone into a file over various periods of time
> (helps you identify where extension / maintenance work is being focused
> in a project, can suggest places to refactor, etc.).

This topic has come up before and there were a number of people who
argued that this is a false metric (or at least a misleading one) for
most people. I don't want to minimize how _you_ perceive the utility of
this metric, but "lines changed" can be a very subjective measure. For
example, if I realize that a given block of code needs to be executed
only when a specific precondition is met, I can make a very small
change, basically two lines (the leading if() and the closing brace),
yet the number of lines changed could be huge because I changed the
whitespace to offset the enclosed code.

This is why a post-commit script (which could specifically ignore
whitespace only changes) may be much more appropriate than a possibly
difficult change to the core code.

As far as knowing which files have been touched more than others, it is
pretty easy to run a verbose log and run that through a script which
increments a counter for each time a given file is changed. It's not
exactly a "one-liner" for most people, but neither would it require much
in the way of sophistication to do it. At some point, Subversion should
have a better way of walking the repository to extract this kind of meta
data (perhaps when the mythical SQL backend emerges).

HTH

John

-- 
John Peacock
Director of Information Research and Technology
Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group
4501 Forbes Boulevard
Suite H
Lanham, MD  20706
301-459-3366 x.5010
fax 301-429-5748
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