Tortoise SVN logminsize and externals

Question

We are using Tortoise SVN at our company and many of the programmers here don't write commit messages. They usually just make one big commit at the end of a day(or even a week), without a message. I am responsible for a big part of our framework code, and I want that everybody who commits to this repository has to write a commit message.

I found the tsvn:logminsize property and this works perfectly, as long as you try to commit directly to the repository: the OK button is inactive. However, this repository is mostly (99%) included as an external to other projects. When I commit to the project repositiory, I can also select items from the external and commit them with an empty message.

Is there a way to make Tortoise SVN deactivate the OK button if any project, that uses my repository as an external, tries to commit to it without a message, or prevent files from the external to be included in a project-commit?

Answer 1

Add a pre-commit hook that will reject commits with empty log messages or based on log message size. If you use VisualSVN Server see the article KB140: Validating commit log messages in VisualSVN Server .

We are using Tortoise SVN at our company and many of the programmers here don't write commit messages. They usually just make one big commit at the end of a day(or even a week), without a message.

Train and encourage the developers to make atomic commits and write descriptive log messages. There is a lot of knowledge on this topic on the Internet.