post a diff between svn branch and a tag on review

Question

I want to post an SVN diff to the review board; the diff is generated between the branch HEAD and the base tag.

I used this command to generate the diff file :

svn diff https:/path/to/branch/head https:/path/to/tag

note that

• i tried to use rbt diff revision1:revision2 command to generate the diff. I have a problem that review board only accepts revision range within the branch commits only (not accepting revision from tags).

• i tried to diff using the svn diff command then upload the file using rbt post --diff-filename but the command returned with an error requiring a base directory; i added the base dir to to be the root using rbt post --basedir https:/path/to/root ; the review boards accept but shows the diff on the web page like a diff between https:/path/to/root/branches/featureName/path/to/changed/files and https:/path/to/root/path/to/changed/files without showing that the diff is between branch and a tag like https:/path/to/root/tag/path/to/changed/files.

is there any way to do such job ?

Answer 1

You can post such a diff with the RBTools post command.

Say, for example, your Subversion repository is registered with following URL at review board:

http://svn.example.org/foo/base/group

(where foo is noise and base is the base of your repository)

Then let's assume that we have two tags

http://svn.example.org/foo/base/group/module/tag/abc1
http://svn.example.org/foo/base/group/module/tag/abc2

where abc2 is based on abc1 and introduces some changes.

To create a review request for those changes, first, we make a diff with Subversion:

base=http://svn.example.org/foo/base/group
svn diff $base/module/tag/abc1 $base/module/tag/abc2 \
  > --patch-compatible > change_xyz.diff

We can post the diff with rbt post, but for that, we need a Subversion working directory. An empty one is sufficient:

svn co --depth=empty $base
cd group

The rbt command needs some configuration, to simplify things username/password can also be stored in a run control file, e.g.:

cat > .reviewboardrc <<EOF
REVIEWBOARD_URL = 'http://reviewboard.example.org/'
REPOSITORY = 'somerepo'
PASSWORD = 'einsfueralles'
USERNAME = 'juser'
EOF

When posting the diff the rbt resolves the relative paths in the diff file against the working directory, thus we have to add missing parts with the --basedir option:

rbt post --diff-filename ../change_xyz.diff --basedir module/tag

If everything works ok, rbt uploads the diff and the referenced files to a new draft and prints the new URLs, e.g.:

http://reviewboard.example.org/r/23/
http://reviewboard.example.org/r/23/diff/

The draft can then be edited and finally published via the web UI. The rbt post command also has several options to add additional data (e.g. --summary, --description) and/or directly publish it (cf. --publish).