Temporarily put away uncommitted changes in Subversion (a la "git-stash")

Question

While programming software stored in a Subversion repo, I often modify some files, then notice that I'd like to do some preparatory change for my main work. E.g. while implementing new functionality, I notice some refactoring which might help me.

In order not to mix two unrelated changes, in these cases I'd like to "stow away" my changes, i.e. revert to the repository version, do some other changes, commit these, then "fetch back" my changes.

git-stash allows to do just that. Is there some way to do this with Subversion, either directly or with some plugin or script. Eclipse plugins would also be fine.

Answer 1

This blog post advises using diff and patch.

• git stash approximately becomes svn diff > patch_name.patch; svn revert -R .
• git stash apply becomes patch -p0 < patch_name.patch

Note that this doesn't stash metadata changes or (I think) directory creates/deletes. (Yes, svn tracks those separately from directory contents, unlike git.)

Answer 2

You can store your current changes with svn diff into a patch file, then revert your working copy:

svn diff > stash.patch svn revert -R . 

After you’ve implemented your preparatory feature, you can then apply your patch with the patch utility:

patch < stash.patch 

As others have noted this will not work with svn:properties and tree operations (add, remove, rename files and directories).

Binary files could also give problems, I don’t know how patch (or TortoiseSVN in this case handles them).