Is author name in SVN changelog reliable for tracking authorship?

Question

In multi-user environment it's sometimes very useful to know the real author of each changeset in the SVN repository.

I see there's "Edit author" in Tortoise SVN. Does this mean that anyone can do whatever and then just change the author name on that changeset so that the change is attributed to another user?

Can a real changeset author be identified?

Answer 1

By default, the SVN server will reject this change. You need to customise the pre-revprop-change hook on the server to allow particular commit properties to be edited after the fact.

See this:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2042767/change-author-name-in-tortoisesvn

http://www.visualsvn.com/support/svnbook/ref/reposhooks/pre-revprop-change

Answer 2

The author name is only reliable in standard commits, when you do merges the merge lists the person doing the merge as the author which can be confusing

Answer 3

Yes and no.

It's up to you, through the pre-revprop-change hook, to decide whether everyone can change an author, or no-one can, or just restrict it to a repository administrator.

Choice is good.