Dealing with SVN keyword expansion with git-svn

I recently asked about keyword expansion in Git and I'm willing to accept the design not to really support this idea in Git.

For better or worse, the project I'm working on at the moment requires SVN keyword expansion like this:

svn propset svn:keywords "Id" expl3.dtx

to keep this string up-to-date:

$Id: expl3.dtx 803 2008-09-11 14:01:58Z will $

But I would quite like to use Git to do my version control. Unfortunately, git-svn doesn't support this, according to the docs:

"We ignore all SVN properties except svn:executable"

But it doesn't seem too tricky to have this keyword stuff emulated by a couple of pre/post commit hooks. Am I the first person to want this? Does anyone have some code to do this?

svn git version-control

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1 Answer

Unfortunately, RCS keyword substitution breaks this. For example, using $Date$ would require git checkout to touch every file in the tree when switching branches.

That is not true. $Date$ etc. expand to the value which holds at checkin time. That is much more useful anyway. So it doesn't change on other revisions or branches, unless the file is actually re-checked-in. From the RCS manual:

   $Date$ The  date  and  time the revision was checked in.  With -zzone a
          numeric time zone offset is appended;  otherwise,  the  date  is
          UTC.

This also means that the suggested answer above, with the rcs-keyword.smudge filter, is incorrect. It inserts the time/date of the checkout, or whatever it is that causes it to run.

answered 2009-07-28T14:04:11.107

Dealing with SVN keyword expansion with git-svn

1 Answer

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