svn comments added to file on commit?

Question

Is there a way to have commit comments added to changed files on 'svn commit'. I have been told there is a way to do this with cvs, but we use svn. Currently, we have it add the revision number to changed files with '$Revision' keyword.

Answer 1

We migrated from PVCS to SVN and found that they do not have off-the-shelf support for these type of comments which we also think are valuable. All I found was the reason behind it on a FAQ from the SVN guys.

http://subversion.apache.org/faq.html#log-in-source

Answer 2

Short answer :

No, you can't do it Subversion

Explanation:

• Subversion has not internal keyword $Log$
• Changing content of transaction (during transaction, in pre-commit hook) is strictly prohibited (because it may give unpredictable results)

At last :

Log-message inside changed file is almost useless, because you can always use svn log -r REV , and get REV of last change for file with existing keyword. Just re-think about used post-CVS techiques

Answer 3

I think the only way to do this would be to use a pre or post commit hook. Looking at SvnBook it does not appear that the commit message is part of the available variables http://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.5/svn.advanced.props.special.keywords.html

Answer 4

I must be missing something here because comments are part of the svn commit command.

Here's a quick example: $ svn commit -m "added howto section."