Create a client side hook script to prevent user commit to external in TortoiseSVN

Question

My trunk has struct: \trunk ----\data ----\src ----\tool with \tool is external to another place, not in my trunk. So i don't want user commit to \tool in SVN. They can only commit to \data or \src. Can anybody help me to create a hook script to prevent user commit to external (in this case is \tool folder).

Answer 1

I'm not very familiar with externals, but if you do want to create a pre-commit hook script, it's pretty easy code but tricky to debug.

Your pre-commit hook takes in two parameters, $ARGV[0] = repository path, $ARGV[1] = transaction being committed.

Your hook script would use svnlook, something like

svnlook dirs-changed -r $ARGV[0] -t $ARGV[1]

And return a (negative?) exit status if svnlook returned that tools (or anything starting with tools) changed.

Anything you print to STDERR is displayed to client as the error message.

You would place this script in your repository under hooks, name it "pre-commit", make it executable

Be sure to check the svnlook documentation as I'm going on memory here