Matt Refghi's Blog Technology and other written works

Subversion: Repository Has Not Been Enabled To Accept Revision Propchanges

Last night I set up Subversion on my main development machine, which is running Vista. To do this, I followed the steps outlined by Jeff Atwood on his Coding Horror blog. His article was very helpful - it allowed me to install Subversion rather painlessly, despite the few HTML glitches I encountered in his instructions.

This morning, I opened the "Show log" page for a particular file using TortoiseSVN, and noticed one of the revisions I checked in was missing a comment. I right-clicked it, and selected "Edit log message", wanting to add a comment then and there.  A little text editor popped up, and I typed the message. After I pressed OK, I was hit with this:

"Repository has not been enabled to accept revision propchanges; ask the administrator to create a pre-revprop-change hook"

Solution

To correct this, I needed to create a file in the "hooks" folder of my Subversion repository. On my system, it was located at C:\svn\repository\hooks. I created a file called "pre-revprop-change.bat", and I set the contents to this:

rem Only allow log messages to be changed.
if "%4" == "svn:log" exit 0
echo Property '%4' cannot be changed >&2
exit 1

This solution was suggested in the TortoiseSVN documentation.

After saving the file with those contents, I was able to edit the revision comments without encountering the error message.

See Also

TortoiseSVN Users Mailing List: RE: Labels and Comments

TortoiseSVN Documentation: Server side hook scripts