Re: svn feature addition?

On Fri, Jun 2, 2017 at 1:43 AM, Eggler, Ron (GE Energy Connections)
<Ron.Eggler_at_ge.com> wrote:
> Hi There,
>
> I am looking for the following features in svn:
>
> - When you do svn commit, instead of automatically submitting all
> changed files in the directory, in the dialog where you enter the commit
> message (if -m flag is not used), is there a feature to uncheck any files
> that should not be committed/select files to be committed?

With the commandline client that's not possible at the moment (GUI
clients might offer this in their commit dialog). Would be nice
though. I guess the UI for 'svn' might be to edit the stuff below
"--This line, and those below, will be ignored--" in your editor that
comes up for the commit message.

I did some archaeology and found an old discussion about this [1]. It
got some support, but it seems not enough to eventually implement it.
In that thread, Karl Fogel hinted there was a closed issue and earlier
dev@ discussion about it, which I found here [2] (issue #1295) and
here [3].

The issue also refers to a patch by Mark Grosberg ([4], [5]). His last
patch submission ([5]) contains a long discussion which reads a bit
"bikesheddy". Eventually it seems the discussion died and the patch
did not get committed. (If you search the dev@ archives for 1295 there
are earlier iterations of the patch which contain some more
discussion).

Maybe that last patch can be brought back to life, and re-discussed?

> - Is there an option to inspect each file further line-by-line for
> lines that have changed to either be selected or excluded from the commit?

Ah, now that's an interesting feature that I also miss sometimes. I
listed it on the whiteboard during the svn hackathon in 2015 [6], I
referred to it as "partial commit". It's not possible right now with
"core svn", but TortoiseSVN has implemented a way to do this with what
they call "restore after commit" [7].

I think it would be great to have such a feature in SVN itself.

For some more background, it has been discussed before a couple of
times on our lists ([8], [9]), and on StackOverflow ([10], [11]).
Someone even seems to have implemented in a script something similar
to the TSVN feature [12].

> I am interested to potentially work on patches that would extend svn with
> the above functionality if not present already, does anyone know? It seems
> like these options would be really useful…

I think it would be great if you could work on this. We're mostly a
volunteer-driven project these days, so helping hands are always
welcome. If you want to discuss specs or design, or start writing /
discussing patches, it's best to bring those to the dev@ mailinglist
(and take a look at our Community Guide [13]).

[1] https://svn.haxx.se/users/archive-2005-06/0557.shtml

[2] https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/SVN-1295 (Ability to edit
the list of files being commited)

[3] https://svn.haxx.se/dev/archive-2002-01/0715.shtml

[4] https://svn.haxx.se/dev/archive-2003-05/0709.shtml

[5] https://svn.haxx.se/dev/archive-2003-05/0904.shtml

[6] https://svn.haxx.se/dev/archive-2015-09/0187.shtml -- see "(
partial commit (one hunk out of many) (-> TortoiseSVN?) )"

[7] https://tortoisesvn.net/docs/nightly/TortoiseSVN_en/tsvn-dug-commit.html#tsvn-dug-commit-restore

[8] https://svn.haxx.se/dev/archive-2006-07/0817.shtml

[9] https://svn.haxx.se/users/archive-2010-01/0287.shtml

[10] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/75809/partial-commits-with-subversion

[11] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/314132/is-there-some-way-to-commit-a-file-partially-in-tortoisesvn

[12] http://webstaff.itn.liu.se/~karlu20/div/blog/2013-05-31_SVNPartialCommit.php

[13] http://subversion.apache.org/docs/community-guide/

-- 
Johan
(Going for the record of most footnotes in an svn-mailinglist-post)