Subversion Reversion

Or “Please Please Just Make the Crazy Things Go Away”

Reversion becomes essential when you start working with bargain software consultants abroad. Though a bit unintuitive, Subversion makes it pretty easy to do.

svn merge -r head:56 SomeClass.java

This will revert from the working revision HEAD to revision 56. Now simply:

svn commit -m "What the #%&* were you thinking?!"

to push the previous version back to HEAD.

Reversion in Subversion is actually a kind of merge. More details in the Subversion Book.

2 thoughts on “Subversion Reversion

  1. Yeah, merge is fine for this. The head:56 means it’s actually applying a reverse diff (because head >= 56).

    At first I thought you wanted to obliterate the change even from the repository history.. surprisingly, can sorta be done with svnadmin dump, but that way lies madness. Particularly if you’re actually collaborating with other folks’ working copies.

  2. Yeah, we’re actually just sweeping crazy things under the rug to keep the madness at bay.

    I think it may too late though.

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