jszakmeister / svnwrap

Wrapper script for Subversion command-line client

Svnwrap - a wrapper script for Subversion

Svnwrap extends the functionality of svn, the command-line interface for the Subversion version control system. Typically, the user will define a shell alias for svn that invokes svnwrap. In this way, operations like svn status will be handled by svnwrap instead of svn. For the Bash shell, the following alias could be placed in ~/.bashrc to make the svn command invoke svnwrap:

alias svn='svnwrap'

Features

• Suppression of noisy output from certain operations such as svn status (especially beneficial when using svn:externals).

• Color highlighting of status, diff, and other outputs.

• Extended "diff" operations (including integration with kdiff3).

• Configurable URL aliases of the form //alias that map to arbitrary URL prefixes. Configuring the alias proj to be http://server/Project would make the following commands identical:

  svn checkout //proj/some/path
  svn checkout http://server/Project/some/path
  

• URL mapping using keywords that takes advantage of context within a working copy. So, for example, in a working copy checked out from http://server/Project/trunk/some/path, creating a tag could be done via:

  svn copy tr: tag:tagname
  

  The working copy's URL (http://server/Project/trunk/some/path) is used as context to allow the tr: keyword to extract everything before the "middle" part (/trunk in this case) and append /trunk. The tag: keyword behaves similarly, but appends /tags instead of /trunk. Thus, the above svn copy operation is equivalent to:

  svn copy http://server/Project/trunk http://server/Project/tags/tagname
  

  Switching or merging a tag is shortened as well:

  svn switch tag:tagname/some/path
  svn merge tag:tagname/some/path
  

• URL adjustment for certain commands. URL suffixes like /some/path may often be omitted during a switch or merge operation because svnwrap can infer the suffix from the context of the current checkout. For example, when executed in a working copy checked out from http://server/Project/trunk/some/path, the following are pairs of equivalent commands:

  svn switch tag:tagname/some/path
  svn switch tag:tagname
  
  svn merge tag:tagname/some/path
  svn merge tag:tagname
  

• Additional new subcommands such as:

  • svn branch for creating branches.
  • svn ee for editing svn:externals.

• See built-in help for more details:

  svnwrap helpwrap
  

Configuration

Svnwrap is configured via a configuration file, typically at one of these locations:

# On Unix:
~/.config/svnwrap/config

# On Windows:
%APPDATA%\svnwrap\config

On first invocation of svnwrap, the config file will be created with a commented skeleton.

Caveats

• On occasion, the svn client needs to invoke an editor (e.g., when encountering a merge conflict). Normally this works fine because the stdout of svn is connected to a terminal. But to created prettied output, svnwrap uses a pipe to capture stdout from svn, which makes some editors unable to function correctly. To work around this problem, svnwrap tries to determine which editor svn would invoke, then it sets the SVN_EDITOR environment variable to point to itself. When svn launches the editor specified by this updated variable, svnwrap duplicates the stderr file descriptor (which should still be connected to the terminal) onto stdout, then executes the original editor. Svnwrap looks in most of the places where an editor might be configured, but it checks only per-user environment variables and config files. It will not check any registry settings on Windows, nor will it check any system-wide configuration files. To overcome this limitation, set the SVN_EDITOR environment variable to your preferred editor settings.