Disclaimer

This is an untested, unstable, alpha version. Use at your own risk.

SVN rebase

A missing (?) functionality for svn. Suppose you've created a feaure branch cool-branch from trunk at revision X. A few weeks later, at revision Y, you realize that you really, really need a bugfix which was done in trunk few days ago. If you are like me you would probably do something like:

 svn remove cool-branch
 svn cp trunk cool-branch
 svn switch cool-branch
 svn merge -r X:Y cool-branch@Y
 svn ci -m "remerged"

Things get messy if you want the new branch, and also keep the old branch, or when you want to rebase to a completelly different branch (i.e. not trunk) or if you want to recreate commits one-by-one, to keep the history, authors, and commit messages.

With this simple tool you get all of these. Simply run:

 ./svn_rebase
 ./svn_rebase --continue

And if something goes wrong, the control is handed back to you, so you can resolve conflicts, and ./svn_rebase --continue.

Options

You may find following options usefull:

• --new-url PATH Use PATH instead of original branch name as the new branch name.
• --source-url PATH Use PATH instead of source of svn copy source branch which created this branch when creating new branch.
• --plan FILENAME Use FILENAME instead of .svn_rebase.plan to store the plan.
• --single-commit Instead of replicating original changesets one-by-one, commit everything at once. Actually there will be at least 3 commits : remove, copy, merge.
• --message MESSAGE When used together with --single-commit, allows you to specify MESSAGE to be used for the single commit.

Details

The first run of ./svn_rebase checks some preconditions (do you have uncomited changes? have you updated to the latest revision?), and creates a .svn_rebase.plan file which contains a plan of commands to execute. You can open this file and review it at this point, to make sure that all your strange utf-8, newlines, and double-quotes in commit messages are correctly encoded. (Actually that may be quite hard to tell, as they are now utf-8-encoded + escapeshellargs-escaped + entities-encoded).

The second run, with ./svn_rebase --continue option, will open that plan end execute it. After each successful command execution, the command is removed from the plan, and the file is updated. Whenever a command returns non-zero exit code, the execution stops, and you can fix merge errors, conflicts, etc. Once you are done, simply execute ./svn_rebase --continue and it will continue from where it failed. Of course you can edit the file yourself, as it is a human readable XML in case of some really nasty problems.