This section is from the "Version Control with Subversion" book, by Ben Collins-Sussman, Brian W. Fitzpatrick and C. Michael Pilato. Also available from Amazon: Version Control with Subversion.
In addition to the usual INI-based configuration area, Subversion clients running on Windows platforms may also use the Windows registry to hold the configuration data. The option names and their values are the same as in the INI files. The “file/section” hierarchy is preserved as well, though addressed in a slightly different fashion—in this schema, files and sections are just levels in the registry key tree.
Subversion looks for system-wide configuration values
under the
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Tigris.org\Subversion
key. For example, the global-ignores
option,
which is in the miscellany
section of the
config
file, would be found at
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Tigris.org\Subversion\Config\Miscellany\global-ignores
.
Per-user configuration values should be stored under
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Tigris.org\Subversion
.
Registry-based configuration options are parsed before their file-based counterparts, so are overridden by values found in the configuration files. In other words, Subversion looks for configuration information in the following locations on a Windows system; lower-numbered locations take precedence over higher-numbered locations:
Command-line options
The per-user INI files
The per-user Registry values
The system-wide INI files
The system-wide Registry values
Also, the Windows Registry doesn't really support the
notion of something being “commented out”.
However, Subversion will ignore any option key whose name
begins with a hash (#
) character. This
allows you to effectively comment out a Subversion option
without deleting the entire key from the Registry, obviously
simplifying the process of restoring that option.
The svn command-line client never
attempts to write to the Windows Registry, and will not
attempt to create a default configuration area there. You can
create the keys you need using the REGEDIT
program. Alternatively, you can create a
.reg
file, and then double-click on that
file from the Explorer shell, which will cause the data to be
merged into your registry.
Example 7.1. Sample Registration Entries (.reg) File.
REGEDIT4 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Tigris.org\Subversion\Servers\groups] [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Tigris.org\Subversion\Servers\global] "#http-proxy-host"="" "#http-proxy-port"="" "#http-proxy-username"="" "#http-proxy-password"="" "#http-proxy-exceptions"="" "#http-timeout"="0" "#http-compression"="yes" "#neon-debug-mask"="" "#ssl-authority-files"="" "#ssl-trust-default-ca"="" "#ssl-client-cert-file"="" "#ssl-client-cert-password"="" [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Tigris.org\Subversion\Config\auth] "#store-passwords"="yes" "#store-auth-creds"="yes" [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Tigris.org\Subversion\Config\helpers] "#editor-cmd"="notepad" "#diff-cmd"="" "#diff3-cmd"="" "#diff3-has-program-arg"="" [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Tigris.org\Subversion\Config\tunnels] [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Tigris.org\Subversion\Config\miscellany] "#global-ignores"="*.o *.lo *.la #*# .*.rej *.rej .*~ *~ .#* .DS_Store" "#log-encoding"="" "#use-commit-times"="" "#no-unlock"="" "#enable-auto-props"="" [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Tigris.org\Subversion\Config\auto-props]
The previous example shows the contents of a
.reg
file which contains some of the most
commonly used configuration options and their default values.
Note the presence of both system-wide (for network
proxy-related options) and per-user settings (editor programs
and password storage, among others). Also note that all the
options are effectively commented out. You need only to
remove the hash (#
) character from the
beginning of the option names, and set the values as you
desire.