Tortoise SVN Author in Log File Missing

Question

For some reason, no matter how I go about it, I cannot get TortoiseSVN to add an Author to Log Messages. Currently we connect to a PC running svnserve, so it's not a file:// Address.

We have tried using svn://Username@svnAddress, svn://svnAddress

Even setting svn:keywords $Author: AuthorName$

I was under the impression that TortoiseSVN would use the windows login name, prior to upgrading from a file based repo, these did show.

Note: We are also connecting to a domain, if this would affect anything. also, no hook scripts are in play and the svnserve.conf is default.

SVN Server is using SVN Version 1.5.1 (x86), Windows Server 2003.

Clients are using latest version of Tortoise, both x86 and x64.

Any help would be much appreciated.

Ohh and the SVN is used for source code, so it is programming related :) (well semi related anyway)

Answer 1

The svn: protocol, by default, does not do any authentication, and consequently, no identification of the remote user. As TortoiseSVN does not need to authenticate, no user gets logged.

The SVN keywords don't have to do much with this: If you put $Author$ in a file, it will expand to the author of the commit, rather than setting the user. In the keyword syntax, there is no support for colons.

So if you want to authenticate with svnserve, you should first set anon-access to none or read, to force an authentication prompt. You then need to setup a password database; svnserve has only support for CRAM-MD5 builtin. I recommend you try to get this working first, handing out new passwords to all users. Alternatively, you can try to setup SASL, which would then allow for NTLM authentication - provided you can get SASL to work on your system.

Yet alternatively, you can switch to a different protocol. If, by "PC", you mean "Windows", then I guess the ssh-based protocol is ruled out. That leaves http(s); it should be possible to set up Apache on Windows with NTLM authentication, so that the NTLM user appears as the svn author.