Question

I have 4 versions of file A.txt in my subversion repository, say: A.txt.r1, A.txt.r2, A.txt.r3 and A.txt.r4. My working copy of the file is r4 and I want to switch back to r2. I don’t want to use ‘svn update -r 2 A.txt‘ because this will delete all the revisions after r2, namely r3 and r4.

So is there any way that I update my working copy to r2 and still having the option to switch to r3 and r4 later? Put it another way, I want to still be able to see all 4 revisions by using ‘svn log A.txt‘ after doing the update.

Answer 1

I don’t have a lot of experience with Subversion so please excuse me if this method doesn’t work in this environment.

In this situation I follow these steps:

1. Check out the file in question ready for editing as r4
2. Overwrite your local copy of the file with the revision you require, in this case r2
3. Check in / commit this "new" revision of the file as r5 with an appropriate comment

This way when you go through your file history you will see something like:

• r1
• r2
• r3
• r4
• r5 (comment: ‘reverted to r2 content’)