Subversion – show commit details when editing commit message

by bigpresh on May.21, 2009, under Perl, Programming, Uncategorized

Something I’ve wanted to do for a while is get the list of changed files and a diff into the commit message in my editor when I make a commit with Subversion.

With Git, you can pass the -v (verbose) option when committing, and the commit message you edit will include diffs as well as the list of modified files.

Subversion provides no such option, so I put together a little wrapper shell script to do this for me.

The script provides a function named svncommit (which I alias to just ‘ci’ for supreme shortness :) ).

When used, after the “–This line, and those below, will be ignored–” marker line, the list of files and then diffs will be inserted, as shown in the screenshot below (click for full size):

The script itself is relatively simple (it was knocked up quickly; I’ll probably improve on it sometime):

# Do an svn commit, with diffs included in the commit message
svncommit() {
 
    # Start preparing the commit message which we'll then edit
    COMMITMSG=/tmp/$USER-commitmsg
    echo > $COMMITMSG
    echo "--This line, and those below, will be ignored--" >> $COMMITMSG
    svn status "$@" >> $COMMITMSG
    echo >> $COMMITMSG
 
    # Now do a diff; work out stats on lines added/removed by looking at
    # the diff, add that info, then the diff itself
    svn diff "$@"   > /tmp/$USER-svndiff
    LINESADDED=$(  grep '^+[^+]' /tmp/$USER-svndiff | wc -l)
    LINESREMOVED=$(grep '^-[^-]' /tmp/$USER-svndiff | wc -l)
    echo "Added $LINESADDED lines, removed $LINESREMOVED lines" >> $COMMITMSG
    echo >> $COMMITMSG
    cat /tmp/$USER-svndiff >> $COMMITMSG
    echo >> $COMMITMSG
 
    ORIGMD5=$(md5sum $COMMITMSG)
    $VISUAL $COMMITMSG
 
    if [[ "$(md5sum $COMMITMSG)" == "$ORIGMD5" ]]; then
        echo "Commit message unchanged, commit aborted";
    else
        svn commit "$@" -F $COMMITMSG
    fi
 
    rm $COMMITMSG
    rm /tmp/$USER-svndiff
}

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5 Comments for this entry

baba
May 27th, 2009 on 9:40 am
nice post and thanks for the script i will use it and will try to improve it.
Sam
June 4th, 2009 on 1:01 pm
Helpful and great post. Thank’s for sharing
Ber2
June 13th, 2009 on 8:18 pm
Very useful Post. Thanks for the script. I will use it.
Stephen
June 22nd, 2009 on 8:15 pm
I think I messed something up when I changed the script, I will have another go, thankf for this
Single socket outlet
July 20th, 2009 on 11:58 am
thanks for this usefull informations..
now i find what i want to know..
thanks so much..