[Python-Dev] svn diff -r {2001-01-01}

["Martin v. Löwis"]

Greg Stein points out that because of the way the subversion
conversion was done, by-date revision specifications won't
work. Subversion assumes that time is monotonically increasing
over revions numbers - it does a binary search to find out
the revision that immediately precedes(?) the specified date.

Yet, as the conversion was done project-by-project (toplevel
svn dirs), commit time sometimes goes backward along with
increasing revision numbers; this breaks the algorithm
svn uses.

There are two way in which you might want to use date specifications
(that I can think of): svn diff (find the changes since some date)
and svn up (check out revision at some date). If you need to
do such operations, you will have to look up the closest
revision number manually (e.g. in viewcvs, or through svn log).
If this is a common operation, I'm sure it would be possible
to put a table of commit dates for python/ somewhere, to find
the necessary revision number more quickly.

For dates past the switchover, everything is fine. So

svn diff -r{00:00} Lib/

works fine.

Regards,
Martin