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I am currently working on a patch for an open-source program (not authored by me) used by other people who are not very computer literate. I keep my changes stored in a personal SVN and would like to distribute them in a patch to these "other people". Normally, if they are programmers, I could've just given them an SVN patch file and then could just merge the changes, but again, that's out of question.

A possible solution would be to bundle all the changed files together (with preserved hierarchy) and tell the others to unpack and overwrite, but it can be a bit annoying to keep track of which files were changed and which files weren't as well as the need to write a script for that.

Is there a more elegant solution?


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2 Answers 2

SVN is not for distributing software or pathes to end-users. You should use some installer.

Inno Setup from JRSoftware is very powerful tool for creating installers.

You can use some wizard to pre-configure your installer, then customize it by changing script that generates exe file.

Here you can download IS (Inno Setup)

If you are not familiar with tools like this - you should get "QuickStart Pack" version.

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Not for you.

If you know, which revision in your repo is "vanilla code" (of original program), you can

  • get tree of only changed files in revrange (rev:HEAD)
  • tag your current HEAD as <ANYLABEL>
  • next time for producing tree use ANYLABEL:HEAD range and repeat from p.2

the need to write a script for that

Scripts and method for TortoiseSVN for exporting range of revisions

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Thanks. Will give that a try. –  Some Newbie Jan 27 '13 at 19:48

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