Dmitry Potapov wrote:
On Wed, Apr 16, 2008 at 11:36:26AM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:
It makes me wonder if there is a better way.
For example, CVS honors LOGNAME to allow you to "lie" who the author of a
change was, which is the behaviour inherited from RCS. I have to wonder
if SVN has a similar mechanism to tell it "Excuse me, but I am just a
secretary recording changes for my boss."
Yes, there is such a mechanism:
====
Revision Property (revprop)
Just as files can have properties, so can each revision in the
repository. Some special revprops are added automatically when the
revision is created, namely: svn:date svn:author svn:log which represent
the commit date/time, the committer and the log message respectively.
These properties can be edited, but they are not versioned, so any
change is permanent and cannot be undone.
====
So, it is possible not only set the real author but also date/time.
Unfortunately, there is one problem with this approach -- by default,
these properties are disabled from modification for security reasons.
To enable modification of these properties, the administrator is
required to change some hooks. Personally, I have never observed any
SVN repository where anyone was granted the right to change them. So,
while it is possible, it is impractical.
Yes, and in fact with most shared SVN hosting services the users are
left with no option to do this.
While there doesn't seem to be a command-line way to do this, it's
possible that a commit "editor" making a new commit can create revision
properties without being necessarily subject to those restrictions.
Possible, but I guess unlikely as it would then be inconsistent.
The usual thing is to dump the extra information in the commit message.
Some projects, like Perl, were quite systematic about this and a lot of
useful author information is available. In fact, it was saved in the
proposed form.
While not the main thrust of this thread, the usual convention for
mapping svn committers to names is a project AUTHORS file. This made me
wonder whether allowing git-svn to take its author map from the
repository, such as from a revision property or a directory property of
the root or project would be a good idea.
Sam
--
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
