Subversion Keyword Substitution

Those of you who have previously used CVS may be accustomed to inserting revision information into CVS checkins using keywords such as $Id: $. Subversion offers a similar facility, but requires setting an svn property on the file first to tell it you want keyword substitution to be done. Details are in the Keyword Substitution section of Version Control with Subversion.

If you're working with LaTeX documents, you may be interested in the svn and svninfo macro packages, which can take Subversion keyword substitutions and reformat them into LaTeX dates, headers, and footers.

Important note: Unlike CVS, Subversion will quite happily do keyword substitution on binary files if you set the svn:keywords property on those files. This will almost certainly corrupt the file. Avoid setting this property on binaries, particularly ones that are likely to contain text strings, such as tar archives and ZIP files.

-- brodbd - 2010-01-19