(Programmers: skip down to the Meat section below.)
If you are so bored as to actually have read all the articles on this blog, you may have noticed that the “Id: lucas blah blah blah” string that shows up at the bottom of the articles. This is an interpolated keyword, put in by the revision control system, that shows in the text of the document when it was last committed to revision control.
Subversion (svn) is a revision control system — probably the leading such system for new deployments (I am not counting Microsoft-land, where old, proprietary systems still abound). It’s most familiar as the replacement for the venerable CVS, which used to do replacement more or less automatically. But a stock Subversion install won’t do keyword replacement unless you do a “property setting,” or propset, on a file-by-file basis (this is to prevent clobbering a file that happens to have the magical string in it).
Therefore, you have to remember to do something like this to your new files:
svn propset svn:keywords Id myfile.txt
This tells svn to set the “svn:keywords” property to “Id,” meaning it will replace instances of $Word: $ with the ID string (when “Word” is “Id”).
However, this is a pain, and although you could conceivably script this action as a hook upon new additions to svn, there’s an easier way.
Meat
Find your local ~/.subversion/config file and edit it. Set the following:
[miscellany] enable-auto-props=yes [auto-props] *.txt=svn:keywords=Id
(The default config file has a bunch of examples commented out for you to base your settings on, but the above is the minimal set to get textfiles set with keyword substitution for the “Id” keyword.)