Subversion: How to compare differences between incoming changes?

Question

I would like to see the changes that my co-workers have made before I accept the incoming changes.

So I start by getting the status

svn st -u

...which tells me that I've got an incoming change

    *     9803   incomingChanges.html
M         9803   localChanges.html
M   *     9803   localAndIncoming.html

I can see what I've changed

svn diff localChanges.html

...but how can I diff localAndIncoming.html to show what has been changed, and how it's different than my working copy?

Solution 1

I believe what you need is:

svn diff -rBASE:HEAD

Solution 2

FYI svn diff gives a diff based on the unmodified file stored in the .svn directory, not based on the live repo version.

You can run svn update to get subversion to attempt an update (and possibly merge) and then do an svn diff, but that's not as clean as I guess you want.

Finally svn diff does support diffing just on the repo. Example:

svn diff svn://svnserver/repo/localChanges.html -r REV_NO

Which defaults to comparing HEAD with the passed revision.

Solution 3

With tortoisesvn (if you use windows)

• Invoke the log screen

• Select head revision

• Right click on localAndIncoming.html

• Choose Compare with working copy

Comments

[Arjan]

Not an answer to your command line question, but: in the end, once you know what is different from your working copy, you'll probably want to merge the repository changes with your own changes. When using some GUI to do so, why not use a GUI to help you do the initial diff as well? Tools like TortoiseSVN offer such compare. Also, IDEs like Eclipse can make reviewing incoming changes (even when there's nothing to merge -- nice to get an idea of what your coworkers have been up to) very easy, avoiding automatic merges.

[Christian]

Is there a GUI way of seeing incoming changes using TortoiseSVN?

[Raffi Khatchadourian]

You'd also want to diff incomingChanges.html as well, no?

[rds]

This work, but a scm should provide a more integrated way.