Svn diff and patch

A customary diff patch can be with -p1 which strips the first dir off the path patch -E -p1 -d difftest-to-be-patched The -E is not important here, but it is needed for patches created by svn.

I suggest you always use it. The following command will tell you 2 directories are identical. You just have to trust me. We will use this more later. It is a diff command, not a same command. You need to lookup the means of the args given to the diff and patch commands in there man pages. I hate telling people to RTFM because most are so long you cannot find what you need. I am telling you what you need and asking you to learn why.

The mysterious argument is "N" on the diff command. The manual says, "Treat absent files as empty. That's important and hard to troubleshoot. Second exercise: Let's put our test into an svn repo and create the patch from there. These steps assume you have completed the steps above. There is a subtle difference between patches created with diff and svn diff. Patch files are applied to your working copy.

This should be done from the same folder level as was used to create the patch. If you are not sure what this is, just look at the first line of the patch file. However, provided you are in the correct working copy, if you pick the wrong folder level, TortoiseSVN will notice and suggest the correct level. In order to apply a patch file to your working copy, you need to have at least read access to the repository. The reason for this is that the merge program must reference the changes back to the revision against which they were made by the remote developer.

This will bring up a file open dialog allowing you to select the patch file to apply. By default only. If you previously saved a patch to the clipboard, you can use Open from clipboard Copying a patch to the clipboard from another app will not make the button appear. Alternatively, if the patch file has a. In this case you will be prompted to enter a working copy location.

These two methods just offer different ways of doing the same thing. With the first method you select the WC and browse to the patch file. With the second you select the patch file and browse to the WC. Once you have selected the patch file and working copy location, TortoiseMerge runs to merge the changes from the patch file with your working copy. A small window lists the files which have been changed. We can apply the previous patch file to another working copy from our repository using svn patch , and verify that it did the right thing by using svn diff :.

Use the --reverse-diff option for this purpose. In the following example, we'll squirrel away a patch file which describes the changes in our working copy, and then use a reverse patch operation to undo those changes.

You are reading Version Control with Subversion for Subversion 1. Fitzpatrick, and C. Michael Pilato. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution License v2.

Name svn patch — Apply changes represented in a unidiff patch to the working copy.