How might I force our developers to enter notes when committing via TortoiseSVN? [duplicate]

Question

I often see a slew of commits, but no notes referencing the tickets... And so I end up going back and reviewing the diff manually. Not necessarily bad, but it would be nice to have notes. Any ideas?

Answer 1

Not TortoiseSVN, but Subversion itself - a setting on the server. You can set up a pre-commit hook that enforces a commit comment. There are also pre-commit hooks that will verify the presence of a reference to an issue tracking system like Jira if you want to go one step further.

Answer 2

You can define a pre-commit hook script which rejects all commits with an empty or too short log message.

Here is a post on how to do it.

Answer 3

You need to use a pre-commit hook which is a server setting, I have written one for VisualSVN which is basically a batch file -- similar scripts are available for non-windows based SVN Servers.

@echo off
::
:: Stops commits that have empty log messages.
::
@echo off
setlocal

rem Subversion sends through the path to the repository and transaction id
set REPOS=%1
set TXN=%2

rem check for an empty log message
call "C:\program files\visualsvn server\bin\svnlook" log %REPOS% -t %TXN% | findstr . > nul
if %errorlevel% gtr 0 (goto err) else exit 0

:err
echo. 1>&2
echo Your commit has been blocked because you didn't give any log message 1>&2
echo Please write a log message describing the purpose of your changes and 1>&2
echo then try committing again. -- Thank you 1>&2
exit 1