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While I am on the 'discovering trip'. Here is another thing I found out this week. This time I actually knew that this particular feature existed, but I never really knew how to use it and how it actually works. I am talking about svn changelists. They are part of subversion since version 1.5 and so far were only something I read about. However, this week I discovered by accident the 'move to changelist' button in the Intellij Idea svn plugin. I just tried it and immediately it dawned on my how useful this feature is. It allows me for example to move some files, which I always change, but never commit into a seperate changeset. This way I don't have to remember to either revert or not commit these files. You probably think that such files should not exists in a properly setup project, but what about for example log4j.properties. I personally like to collect log4j output in Chainsaw , but on the other hand I don't want to commit the log4j configuration file with the required socket appender enabled. Well, now I just moved log4j.properties into its own changelist and I don't have to think about it anymore.
From the command line you are using the changelist feature via the '--changelist' options which can be passed to most of the svn sub-commands. For example a checkin would look like this:

svn commit -m "my log message" --changelist myChangeList

One caveat though. I was assuming that committing without specifying a changelist would only commit the files which are not specifically in a changelist. Unfortunately, that's not the case. Instead all changes are committed. That's a clear drawback for me, but at least it is hidden from me when using the Idea plugin.

Time to hand-over to Fredrik again for a less technical blog entry :)

--Hardy