TortoiseSVN's SubWCRev app is windows-only. For those developing cross-platform apps, it's nice to have a command-line compatible alternative to swap into the build process. Only dependencies are Python and pysvn.

Rational

There is a Linux version of SubWcRev called svnwcrev, that still works in many cases. Though lately I had issues with binary files (UTF-8 error), so I looked for an update, just to find out that tigris is dead since 2020. Since I still had the sources, I published them on git for reference https://github.com/FauthD/svnwcrev.

While looking for a solution to my UTF-8 issues, I found https://github.com/nickveys/pysubwcrev , but that was written in Python2. For luck only 3 lines needed a change, so I forked and provide that here.

Build on Ubuntu (20.04)

• sudo apt install python3-svn

• sudo cp src/pysubwcrev.py /usr/local/bin

  optional create symlinks for the old names

• sudo ln -s /usr/local/bin/pysubwcrev.py /usr/local/bin/subwcrev

• sudo ln -s /usr/local/bin/pysubwcrev.py /usr/local/bin/SubWcRev

  Build general

  You can also use pip to install the required library.

• pip3 install pysvn

Ansible role to install pysvnwcrev

Also uninstalls the good old C-Based svnwcrev and links. Various symlinks are created with different flavours of names.

Hints

• Avoid using the keywords TimeNowUTC and TimeNow, they trigger the regeneration of the destination file and therefore can trigger an undesired rebuild of make targets.
• Name the template and destination files the same in all projects. E.g.: svn_rev.tmpl and svn_rev.EXT (EXT depends on your project).
• Use make or cmake rules that regenerate svn_rev.EXT on every build.
• Use a marker that tells you whether the build is based on modified (uncommitted) sources). You can append this to your version number to do that: "\$WCMODS?M:\$". It adds an 'M' for uncommited sources.
• Or use an "#if \$WCMODS?1:0\$" construct if your language allows it (like C/C++ preprocessor) and fire an error for uncommiteted sources (in release builds). Though sometimes this can be inflexible.

• Example for a very simple template file:

  // Revision in SVN (created by SubWCRev)

  SVN_RevisionStr="R\$WCREV\$\$WCMODS?M:\$";