I ran across an issue that my google-foo has had some trouble handling. Maybe what I did is the only way to do it, in which case maybe this will help someone in need… but I rather like to think that someone here will have a much nicer solution.
I use Subversion at most of the clients I work for, for most of the projects I work on. It’s even used in the production/editorial process at both Python Magazine and php|architect Magazine. For my own work, I’m still using it personally mainly because I haven’t had the time to really get a good grip on Git yet.
Though I’ve been using svn almost since it was created, I can’t find a clean way to revert to an earlier revision of a file, and then make that version of the file the new “current” version of the file. At first I thought I could just make a trivial change to the file and commit, but you can’t commit if the file is out of date with the repository (that’s why you’re supposed to run ‘svn up’ before committing – duh). I also didn’t see an option to any of the svn commands that looked like it would work, but maybe I missed something (do tell!).
What I wound up doing was moving the local copy of the file sideways, svn up’ing the file back down, moving the good copy back over (overwriting the one I just svn up’d), and committing. Nasty. It looks like this:
$ mv myfile.php myfile.php.bak
$ svn up myfile.php
$ mv myfile.php.bak myfile.php
$ svn commit myfile.php -m "All cleaned up"
It works, but it just seems like something that should be built into svn somehow. Those with sufficient clue are hereby solicited to share it 🙂