Want to make an svn patch file between a set of revisions

Question

I'd like to create a patch file for a set of revisions either via the svn command line or using Tortoise. I'm on Win 7, if it matters.

I don't need to do a diff. I can do that. I have two different versions of some software. A bug was fixed in version A, that involved a fair number of files. I'd like to port that over to version B. I'm not seeing an easy way to do this other than on a file-by-file basis.

I can click on the files, and do a save revision to, but it doesn't really preserve the folder structure, like doing a patch file would.

Thanks, Eric

Answer 1

I would personally go for the command line svn diff. Here's the download link if you don't have it already: http://subversion.apache.org/packages.html#windows .

Here's the documentation for svn diff: http://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.7/svn.ref.svn.c.diff.html .

Given your description above it may be as simple as:

svn diff --new="url of A" --old="url of B" > mypatch.patch

You can try it with tortoise, but first you need the Windows ports of the unix toolset from GnuWin. http://sourceforge.net/projects/gnuwin32/

This will give you a diff util that can create patch files. TortoiseSVN allows you to set an external diff program, but I'm not sure how well that goes as I have only ever used tortoise as a convenience (any heavy lifting and I'm back to the CLI). Documentation on that here: http://tortoisesvn.net/docs/release/TortoiseSVN_en/tsvn-dug-diff.html . You can also use the external diff with svn. Documentation on that here: http://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.7/svn.advanced.externaldifftools.html .

Answer 2

Erik's suggestion probably would work. I was able to get what I needed done using Jubob's suggestion.

I had 13 changesets, some of which undid part or all of previous changesets to multiple files that I wanted to port from version A to version B of my code. I generated a list of revisions by searching for the defect id in the Message field in Tortoise. I then went to each relevant revision in Tortoise, right clicked on them and did a "Show Changes as Unified Diff". This basically created the diff that Jubob was talking about. On each diff I did a Save As and saved each revision as revision1.patch, revision2.patch, etc.

I started to apply each patch file one at a time using Tortoise, but that got tedious. So I wrote a batch file that ran each one successively. The commands in the batch file looked like:

patch -p0 -i  "C:\mypatchfilelocation\revision1.patch"

Oh and one more thing. Inside each patch file, I had to change the path to match version B's path. So I had to change from, say, c:/versionA/ to c:/versionB/

-Eric

Answer 3

Open the repository browser. Browse to the older version. Right-click on that tag/branch folder, select "mark for comparison". You will see that the repo browser shows that directory in bold now.

Then browse to the new version, right-click on that tag/branch folder, select "Show differences as unified diff" and you'll get a patch file.

Or you can right-click and select "Compare urls" and then in the following dialog select all the changed files, right-click and select "export selection to..." or "save list of selected files to...". "export" keeps the folder structure, "Save..." saves all files into the same folder.