While no secret, it did take some effort to dig up the solution. One drawback of using Subversion is the smaller amount of information and anecdotes available, compared to older products like CVS.
I accidentally committed my changes without a log message. Silly me, click, click, oops.
After due diligence in Google, the Subversion Red-Bean docs taught me that there is a class of properties, like svn:log, that are special.
Some time with svn help propedit showed me that the form I wanted was svn propedit svn:log --revprop -r# PATH.
The error message from that, asking to “define a pre-revprop-change hook”, led me back to Google, and to eventually find that every Subversion repository has a hooks directory that initially carries skeleton versions of the hooks. Copying pre-revprop-change.tmpl to pre-revprop-change (Linux box) and chmod u+x was the last stretch to filling in that gaping hole that I had left in the logs.
All in all pretty painless. If I had been trying to modify another special revision property (e.g. svn:author), I would have had to modify the hook to exit 0 (i.e. exit without error) for properties other than just svn:log.
The last struggle was deciding whether this blog entry qualified as “tinkering” or “development”. Let’s call it “development”, since I think some developers would want to know how to correct that embarassing comment broadcast to the commit mailing list.
