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Date: Wed, 3 Dec 2014 13:18:07 +0000
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Subject: Re: Problems with selecting log revision by date: -r {yyyy-mm-dd}
From: sebb <sebbaz@gmail.com>
To: sebb <sebbaz@gmail.com>, users@subversion.apache.org
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On 3 December 2014 at 13:00, Stefan Sperling <stsp@elego.de> wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 03, 2014 at 12:22:02PM +0000, sebb wrote:
>> I cannot get the examples in the manual to work.
>> They don't produce any output apart from the separator.
>>
>> Is this a known bug?
>>
>> How to reproduce:
>>
>> svn co --depth files https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/subversion/trunk
>> subversion
>>
>> $ svn log -l 10 subversion
>> -- this works OK
>>
>> $ svn log -r {2014-11-30} subversion
>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>> $ svn log -r {2014-11-30T00:00:00} subversion
>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>> This was tried on minotaur, using
>>
>> svn, version 1.7.9 (r1462340)
>>    compiled Jun  3 2013, 11:33:48
>>
>> I have the same problems with the following version
>>
>> svn, version 1.8.10 (r1615264)
>>    compiled Aug 11 2014, 11:33:45 on x86_64-apple-darwin13.0.0
>>
>> =================
>>
>> There's also a minor documentation error, the manual says:
>>
>> If you want to include the 27th in your search, you can either specify
>> the 27th with the time ({"2006-11-27 23:59"}), or just specify the
>> next day ({2006-11-28}).
>>
>> The phrase "the next day" should be "the previous day" or "the day before"
>
> Date search doesn't work on the ASF repository because svn:date properties
> of revisions aren't monotonically increasing.
>
> See the note at the very bottom of http://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.7/svn.tour.revs.specifiers.html#svn.tour.revs.dates

This says:

"... If this ordering isn't maintained, you will likely find that
trying to use dates to specify revision ranges in your repository
doesn't always return the data you might have expected."

Although this may be strictly true, it's not immediately obvious that
nothing might be returned.
It would be helpful if the docs made it a lot clearer that date
selection may not work at all.
This should be stated at the start of the section, rather than a note
at the bottom.
Is the ASF repo unusual in not having monotonic dates? Or is this a
common occurrence (as I suspect)?

Further, it would help if SVN returned some indication that dates
cannot be used on the particular repository.

Though ideally of course it would be nice if the feature worked across
all SVN installations.