Generate history of changes on a file in svn

Question

Is it possible to generate a file, which includes summary(what, when, by whom ) of all the changes made on a certain file? Used to have such option in VSS(I think it was called "History"), and it was great for going back and tracking who made a certain change and when.

BTW, I'm using tortoisesvn

Thank you in advance

Answer 1

Here's a batch file translation of bendin's bash script in How can I view all historical changes to a file in SVN:

@echo off

set file=%1

if [%file%] == [] (
  echo Usage: "%0 <file>"
  exit /b
)

rem first revision as full text
for /F "tokens=1 delims=-r " %%R in ('"svn log -q %file%"') do (
  svn log -r %%R %file%
  svn cat -r %%R %file%
  goto :diffs
)

:diffs

rem remaining revisions as differences to previous revision
for /F "skip=2 tokens=1 delims=-r " %%R in ('"svn log -q %file%"') do (
  echo.
  svn log -r %%R %file%
  svn diff -c %%R %file%
)

Note that this batch file requires a command line SVN client (not TortoiseSVN) to be in your path. I personally use SilkSVN, but there are several.

Answer 2

Right click on file in explorer, then "TortoiseSVN", "Show log".

Uncheck "Hide unrelated changed paths" Uncheck "Stop on copy/rename" Check "Include merged revisions" Click "Show All"

Now, in the top pane you a list of revisions with username, date and log. Click on a revision you're interested in and you can see the full log in the second pane. The third pane shows you every file that was changed in the chosen revision. Double-click on your file in this pane and you can see the changes made in that file.

As remarked previously, Tortoise has a "Blame" functionality which is often very insightful but it can only show the most recent edit on each line of source. And if someone has deleted lines, you don't see their change at all.

Edit:

If you're willing to go to the command-line tool and bash, this question has been answered before: How can I view all historical changes to a file in SVN

On a Windows PC, the best way to get bash and command-line SVN is by installing Cygwin.

Answer 3

As @pajton mentioned, you could use svn log <filename>. The documentation provides the details/limitations.