How can I tell SVN that a file was renamed by another tool?

Question

I am using Subversion with some files that are managed by another application. I would like to rename the files, but the rename must be done from within the application so that it correctly updates its own metadata. This means that I cannot simply use SVN's rename command — the application's metadata will become inconsistent.

So how can I can I tell SVN that the files in the working copy have been renamed by this application, so that it preserves history in the same way as per the rename command?

Answer 1

You do not specify your environment, but if you are on Windows TortoiseSVN provides a little-known and quite elegant solution for this. Suppose you have a file SuiteSetup.cs that you rename to SuiteSetup-Rev2.cs in your application.

Within either the Commit or Check for Modification dialogs on TortoiseSVN's context menu, select the old name (showing a missing status) and the new name (showing a non-versioned status) then open the context menu and select Repair move (reference: Repairing File Renames). As shown in the figure, TortoiseSVN does all the bookkeeping corrections to convert these to a linked delete-add pair, the way a rename or move should appear.

[Adapted from my TortoiseSVN and Subversion Cookbook, part 2, published on Simple-Talk.com. At the time of writing Part 8 is just about to be published.]