Re: Seeking a way to do a full text search in a repository

This is a feature that MS-Visual Source Safe has. So if your group is coming from VSS or had experience with VSS in the past, that is why they are asking. But with Microsoft phasing out support for Visual Source Safe, many groups are looking for new options as MS-Team Systems is very expensive and not very light weight. So you may be one of the first looking for similar features such as the search capability that VSS has. Keep in mind, Subversion aimed to replace CVS, not VSS. Now that Subversion is in the 1.x releases, that is starting change as features from ClearCase and Perforce are being developed.

Currently, there is no built in option on Subversion to search the files that are in the repository for a certain pattern. There are a couple of tools that could aid though. First being the method mentioned by Andrew Reedick in another response to your post, but this can be ugly and time consuming. Second, I believe there is an enhancement to Trac (trac.edgewall.org) that will allow text searches. However, if you have a rather large repository (10,000+ revisions), it'll never get through the initial indexing process in Trac and there is no way to invoke that process from the command line.

If this is something that you would like to see added to Subversion, please create an issue (as an enhancement) in the Subversion issue tracker. Make sure there is not one already there though! If you need a secondary person vouching for this feature, let me know the issue number, I'll be glad to do so and add additional input. I would not expect this enhancement to come around until version 2.0 or later because the road map for 1.x is pretty well much laid out and this is no light weight enhancement. I do know that a few of the committers to the project are aware of a need for this feature.

Don't let this lack of a feature keep you from going to Subversion or abandoning it. While this feature may be lacking, there are plenty of features that'll make the lives of your developers much better than what they had before.

Hope this helps,

Johnathan

>>> On Wed, Feb 6, 2008 at 10:54 AM, in message
<53F4EE95A373AB4887E261A376BC130D02D44BB0_at_AD1HFDEXC306.ad1.prod>, "Bicking,
David (HHoldings, IT)" <David.Bicking_at_thehartford.com> wrote:
> I'm forwarding a request from a coworker who currently has read-only
> access to this list. See below, and I copied him in the post so a
> reply-all will get to him directly.
>
> Thanks,
> David
>
> ---------------------------------------
>
> Hello,
>
> We are starting to implement Subversion in our organization. Our users
> have been asking me for a particular feature, and so far my searching
> has been in vain. The feature is to be able to do a full text search of
> the content of a repository, but without having to download the
> repository to disk. Ideally, this would allow for either searching the
> HEAD revision, a specified revision, or a range of revisions. Is there
> a client out there that allows for repository searching in this manner?
> Note that we are on a Windows platform, so the tool would have to
> support Windows.
>
> Thanks,
>
> ~ Justin
>
>
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Received on 2008-02-06 18:53:47 CET