Changelists in Subversion

I love Subversion and have been using it as a source control system for some years now. I was catching up on some reading (mostly linked from Malcolm’s blog) and spotted an exciting thing coming up in Subversion — changelists.

When I’m coding I tend to end up working on multiple bugs and features at once, and it becomes a pain to work out which edited files correspond to which bug when I then come to check stuff in.

The source control system I used previously — Perforce — deals with this by allowing user-created changelists. These are user-created sets of files tagged with a checkin comment before they’re actually checked in. I often had 3–4 of these active at any one time, with checkin comments such as “Work on feature XX” or more commonly “TESTING — DO NOT CHECK IN”.

Thankfully, this feature is coming to Subversion in version 1.5, and I’m really looking forward to it. I’m sure the guys on the TortoiseSVN project will do a spiffing UI to it too.