Question

I put a mistake into a comment in SVN. Can I edit this after checkin?

Answer 1

Commit messages are ‘unversioned properties’ and can be changed with the svn propset command, for example

$ svn propset --revprop -r 25 svn:log 'Journaled about trip to New York.' property 'svn:log' set on repository revision '25' 

This is setting the revision property called ‘svn:log’ on revision 25

Configuring subversion to allow revision property changes

Because these are unversioned, a default installation of subversion won’t let you modify these properties unless you provide a pre-revprop-change hook script.

Here’s a typical script, from /var/lib/svn/hooks/pre-revprop-change on my system:

#!/bin/sh  REPOS='$1' REV='$2' USER='$3' PROPNAME='$4' ACTION='$5'  if [ '$ACTION' = 'M' -a '$PROPNAME' = 'svn:log' ]; then    echo '$1 $2 $3 $4 $5' >> /var/lib/svn/logchanges.log   exit 0;  fi  echo 'Changing revision properties other than svn:log is prohibited' >&2 exit 1 

This logs changes to svn:log revision properties, and allows the edit by using exit 0, any other revision property change is denied by using exit 1. See patmortech’s answer for a Windows equivalent.