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Re: Modifying svn:log property: good or bad?

From: Eric Johnson <eric_at_tibco.com>
Date: Fri, 26 Feb 2016 11:01:04 -0800

We definitely enforce restrictions. We also log all revprop changes.

Keep in mind that this information is key to establishing a historical
record of what happened with your source code. If you're lawyers haven't
advised you already, you might want to consider what happens if you ever
get hauled into court, and need to testify about the quality of the
historical information in your Subversion repositories. You want to keep
the list of people that can change the revprops (and the revisions
themselves) to an absolute minimum.

Eric.

On Fri, Feb 26, 2016 at 10:03 AM, Alfred von Campe <alfred_at_von-campe.com>
wrote:

> Eric:
>
> Thanks for the feedback. Do you enforce just appending to the svn:log
> property or is that just the policy and everyone follows it? Same question
> for modifying the other recprops: do you enforce it or is it just policy?
>
> Alfred
>
> On Feb 26, 2016, at 12:42, Eric Johnson <eric_at_tibco.com> wrote:
>
> We looked at this problem, and decided that typos were not sufficient
> reason to tamper with history.
>
> However, committers sometimes forget critical information, such as the bug
> # associated with a commit, or other information critical to a useful audit
> trail.
>
> To avoid losing history, and yet allow for such critical information, our
> work-around is to allow changes to the svn:log property, but *only* allow
> appending to existing contents. Once we put that in, people stopped
> complaining.
>
> We don't allow users to change any other revprops.
>
> Eric.
>
> On Fri, Feb 26, 2016 at 7:40 AM, Alfred von Campe <alfred_at_von-campe.com>
> wrote:
>
>> Is modifying the unversioned svn:log property considered bad practice?
>> We’re about to upgrade to a new Subversion server at work, and the central
>> group that manages that server will no longer allow modifications to
>> unversioned properties. Their main reason is so that third party tools
>> like Jira and Crucible, that have daemons that scan check-in comments for
>> keywords and index the results, don’t have to be re-run again to re-index
>> updated commits. They are recommending creating a property on all the
>> files that were affected in a commit (the name/value of the property is not
>> important), and then committing that change with the “correct” check-in
>> comment. I can see their point, but sometimes you just want to correct a
>> minor typo in a commit log.
>>
>> I’m just wondering what collective wisdom of this group is in regards to
>> updating the svn:log property (or other unversioned properties)?
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Alfred
>>
>>
>
>
Received on 2016-02-26 20:01:35 CET

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