HOWTO: See what happened in SVN between builds

I was recently asked how to determine what changed between two builds. Jenkins provides nice interlinks into JIRA (issues), Fisheye (source changes), SVN (sources), but let's say you want to kick things a little more old school and investigate the old way... or the builds you want to compare are no longer shown in Jenkins because they expired and their metadata was automatically purged.

If you can't just look at the changelog in Jenkins to see what revision of source was used for the build, you can check the SVN log to find revision numbers based on the timestamp of the build.

So, if your build was generated on 2011-10-18, you can see that the log shows the last commit before that build was this:

$ svn log http://svn.jboss.org/repos/jbosstools/branches/jbosstools-3.2.x/

...

r35735 | bfitzpat | 2011-10-17 15:35:23 -0400 (Mon, 17 Oct 2011) | 2 lines
Changed paths:
   A esb/plugins/.project
   M esb/plugins/org.jboss.tools.esb.project.core/src/org/jboss/tools/esb/core/runtime/ESBRuntimeResolver_410.java

JBDS-1889 - Now checking for juddi-client-3.1.2.jar as well as 3.1.0 and 3.1.1 when seeing if the runtime includes ESB 4.10

...

Want to see actual diffs between that build and the latest one?

$ svn diff http://svn.jboss.org/repos/jbosstools/branches/jbosstools-3.2.x/@35735 http://svn.jboss.org/repos/jbosstools/branches/jbosstools-3.2.x/

Or, if you want to collect just the section of log relevant to the change:

$ svn log -r35735:HEAD http://svn.jboss.org/repos/jbosstools/branches/jbosstools-3.2.x/

Of course if you have all the sources locally, you don't need to log or diff via a URL - you can simply use local file paths. And if like me you use git-svn instead of pure svn, you can use that to diff or log too.

If you want to easily determine when a branch was created and get the SVN revision number for that branch point, use this:

# from r28571, returns -r28571:HEAD
rev=$(svn log --stop-on-copy \
  http://svn.jboss.org/repos/jbosstools/branches/jbosstools-3.2.x \
  | egrep "r[0-9]+" | tail -1 | sed -e "s#\(r[0-9]\+\).\+#-\1:HEAD#")

If you'd like to view a specific svn revision in your browser, use !svn/bc/REVISION_NUMBER/ before the branch and path to file or folder:

http://svn.jboss.org/repos/jbosstools/!svn/bc/35735/branches/jbosstools-3.2.x/

Git in colour

I've been using Git for a while now, but only today realized I can have coloured output for diff, grep, branch, show-branch and status, without having to hook in any other external tools (like colordiff, for example).

Here's my ~/.gitconfig file, which enables colour:

[user]
        name = Nick Boldt
        email = nickboldt (at) gmail.com

[giggle]
        main-window-maximized = false
        main-window-geometry = 1324x838+0+24
        main-window-view = HistoryView

[core]
        trustctime = false
        branch = auto
        diff = auto
        interactive = auto
        status = auto
        editor = vim

[merge]
        tool = vimdiff

[receive]
        denyCurrentBranch = warn

[branch]
        autosetuprebase = local

[color]
        ui = true
        diff = true
        grep = true
        branch = true
        showbranch = true
        status = true

[color "diff"]
        plain = normal dim
        meta = yellow dim
        frag = blue bold
        old = magenta
        new = cyan
        whitespace = red reverse

[color "status"]
        header = normal dim
        added = yellow
        untracked = magenta

[color "branch"]
        current = yellow reverse
        local = yellow
        remote = red