Question

I’d like to know how to get Subversion to change the name that my changes appear under.

I’m just starting to use Subversion. I’m currently using it to version control code on an XP laptop where I’m always logged in under my wife’s name. I’d like the subversion DB to show the changes under my name.

Later on I’ll replicate the DB so it is accessible to the whole house. My wife uses the office computer where she is always logged in under my name. I’ll probably set it up so that it automatically checks in modified documents… preferably under her name.

Eventually I’ll probably be using it from a linux machine under another username.

Is there some way to modify the user environment to change the user name that Subversion calls you? I’d expect something like setting SVN_USERNAME='Mark' which would override however it usually gets the name.

Update: It looks like the --username flag that Michael referred to does work to change the name reported by 'svn stat', even for local file: repositories. In addition, it is sticky so you don’t need to specify it for the next command. I even rebooted and it still used the '--username' value from my previous boot.

Answer 1

Most Subversion commands take the --username option to specify the username you want to use to the repository. Subversion remembers the last repository username and password used in each working copy, which means, among other things, that if you use svn checkout --username myuser you never need to specify the username again.

As Kamil Kisiel says, when Subversion is accessing the repository directly off the file system (that is, the repository URL is of form file:///path/to/repo or file://file-server/path/to/repo), it uses your file system permissions to access the repository. And when you connect via SSH tunneling (svn+ssh://server/path/to/repo), SVN uses your FS permissions on the server, as determined by your SSH login. In those cases, svn checkout --username may not work for your repository.