historical diffs on moved files

["Peter M. Murray" <pe...@quantrix.com>]

Greetings Subversion Folks!

I am new to Subversion (experienced with CVS) and working on making the 
transition to "subversion-think".  We have run into a question and would 
appreciate your input on it:

It seems to us that one of the very useful aspects of Subversion is that 
it retains file history across moves.  So if I have a file in my project 
/some/dir1/file.java and i move it to some/dir2/file.java, I can still 
examine the history of that file since the day I originally added it to 
the repository.  Suppose "svn log file.java" looks like this:


r5 | pete | ...
moved to new location

r4 | bcabana | ...
edited some stuff

r3 | bcabana | ...
added some stuff

r2 | pete | ....
created file

It seems like we shoudl be able to investigate changes to file.java 
across that history.   However, if I want to see the changes to that 
file between r3 and r4 - "svn diff -r3:4 file.java"  I get a message 
like:  "svn: file://<path-to-repos>/some/dir2/file.java was not found in 
the repository at revision 3".  Now, I understand conceptually that the 
file didn't exist at that location at that revision, but it seems that 
subversion knows where the (ancestor?) file did exist at that time and 
what i really want is to see the changes to that file between those 
revisions - wherever the file existed at the time.  The 
--notice-ancestry flag seems like it should help us here, but it doesn't 
seem to produce anything different in this case.  Does that make sense?

We are considering moving to Subversion for our project in part because 
we are undertaking a significant refactoring of the layout of our java 
packages and would like to preserve file history across that 
rearrangement.  We imported the repository with cvs2svn without a hitch 
- >4900 commits and a db of > 1.9 GB (with all the log files).  Works 
like a champ.

Subversion ROCKS!

Cheers,

pete
peter m. murray
pete@quantrix.com


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Re: historical diffs on moved files

[Toby Johnson <to...@etjohnson.us>]

Peter M. Murray wrote:

>
> Now, I understand conceptually that the file didn't exist at that 
> location at that revision, but it seems that subversion knows where 
> the (ancestor?) file did exist at that time and what i really want is 
> to see the changes to that file between those revisions - wherever the 
> file existed at the time.

This was (will be) fixed in 1.1, which is now a Release Candidate.

See http://subversion.tigris.org/svn_1.1_releasenotes.html, particularly 
"Client follows renames". The official 1.1 release should be sometime in 
August.

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