Including new files in SVN diff

Question

I have a script which builds my application, uploads it to a remote machine, runs a performance test there and captures some metrics that I care about. The script creates a patch file for the local modifications I make in my workspace and shows it along with the performance numbers. This helps me compare the effect of various tuning options. If I want to recreate my workspace at a later date, I can use the SVN revision number and the patch.

svn diff does not report a new files I add to the workspace unless I explicitly use svn add on them first. Is there some way to create a patch file which will include the new files also?

PS: A similar question was asked here but was not answered adequately, IMO.

Answer 1

To make svn diff include all the unversioned files from your local working copy you have to add these files first. svn diff outputs the same changeset that svn commit would use.

If you know for sure that all unversioned files should be added here's what you could do.

Prepare a list of unversioned files by taking from the output of svn status all the lines that start with a question mark:

svn status | grep ^? | sed -r 's/^\? +//' > ../unversioned_files_list.txt

You can then pass that list of files to svn addusing xargs:

xargs -r -d '\n' svn add < ../unversioned_files_list.txt

And then produce the patch:

svn diff > ../my_patch.patch

If you don't want to keep those files added, use the list of files to unadd them:

xargs -r -d '\n' svn rm --keep-local < ../unversioned_files_list.txt

Answer 2

Thanks Alexandre. At first, his approach didn't work in my case. I was sure all new files were maked A in svn status, however, the diff file was still empty. Finally, I found the difference in svn status outputs, the fourth columns in my case are all populated with +, like:

$ svn st
M      .
A  +    New.java

This means the item is scheduled for addition-with-history[1]. This typically happens when you svn move or svn copy a file or directory[2]. In my case, the New.java is svn merged from another branch, including previous commit history in that branch. Let's removed these history information.

First, find all addition-with-history items:

svn status | grep ^A | sed -r 's/^A[ +]+//' > /tmp/add_list

Optionally, remove directory paths in /tmp/add_list to avoid warnings in next step.

Next, remove their history commit information by svn remove:

xargs -r -d '\n' svn remove --keep-local --force < /tmp/add_list

Then, go back to Alexandre's solution to add them to subversion again and get the diff.

References:

[1]http://svnbook.red-bean.com/nightly/en/svn.ref.svn.c.status.html
[2]http://www.linuxtopia.org/online_books/programming_tool_guides/version_control_with_subversion/svn.ref.svn.c.status.html