Question

I want to create a pre-commit hook in SVN (i.e. .bat file for Windows) that checks for empty log messages. Moreover, I want to target this check only for a particular folder in SVN.

Can anybody help regarding the same?

Regards,
Ruhee Jaiswal

Answer 1

If you’re fine with TortoiseSVN, you could enter a client-side hook there.

TortoiseSVN passes the following parameters to the pre-commit hook:

PATH DEPTH MESSAGEFILE CWD

where the interesting one is PATH:

PATH
A path to a temporary file which contains all the paths for which the operation was started. Each path is on a separate line in the temp file.

So, when your hook is called (could be in any language btw), do the following steps:

1. check the content of MESSAGEFILE. If there’s a comment inside, everything is fine, return successful from the script (I don’t remember whether success is indicated by 0 or !0, just give it a try)
2. if the MESSAGEFILE is empty, browse through the file PATH and see if there are affected elements in that. If so, return an error; otherwise return success.