You may well have already encountered Subversion: a centralised version control system which arose from CVS but which loses many of the bugs and awkwardnesses in CVS. If you’re not familiar with the idea, version control systems allow you to keep multiple drafts or versions of files, in a space-efficient way.
They’re just about essential if you have a project with more than one person working on it, and very useful even for solo projects. As well as allowing you to revert changes if you decide that you preferred an earlier version of something, they also act as an ad-hoc backup system.
In this article, I’m going to assume that you already use or have used Subversion, and am going to talk about improving the way in which you use it — by making use of commit hooks.
What are commit hooks?
So, what then are these commit hooks and why might you use them? Well, the process of using Subversion (or most other similar version control systems) once it’s set up goes roughly like this:
User checks out a local version of the project (whatever that project may be — code, text, binary files, anything else you can keep as a file).
User makes their own local changes.
User commits their changes back to the repository.
It’s at that stage three that commit hooks come in. A commit hook is a script that is triggered by a repository event. The hooks I’m going to…
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