Change SVN commit message retroactively?

Question

I would like to re-write a big number of SVN commit messages to a different structure, e.g. prefix a category. From:

\"foo\" now accepts \"bar\" format for con

Answer 1

You can certainly change log messages retroactively, it's covered in the FAQ. I'm not sure how the command line interface for VisualSVN works, but for vanilla svn the command would be

svn propset -r N --revprop svn:log "new log message" URL

If you want to do this for all revisions without dumping the repository and re-loading, you could script this command to work on a list of all revisions. It would take some time to do this way, depending on the size of your repository, but in principle there's no reason you can't do it, and it does not involve a dump and reload.

Also, vanilla SVN has a command svnlook which is sort of an administrative tool that works directly with the repository files. That tool doesn't understand URLs (you must have filesystem-level access to the repository), but is much faster. The syntax is a little different, but you can modify properties in the same way using that tool.