We came up with an idea to require developers to write down SVN revision numbers in commit messages. This helps to relate code changes to actual tasks if such a need arises. To do that we’ve created a pre commit hook that requires developers to insert internal project management tool task number to the SVN commit comment field.

A pre commit hook can be a simple bash script. In our case it was this script:

#!/bin/sh
REPOS="$1"
TXN="$2
# Make sure that the log message contains some text.
SVNLOOK=/usr/bin/svnlook
$SVNLOOK info -t "$TXN" "$REPOS" | grep -P 'FB:\s*\d{3,6}' > /dev/null
if [ $? -ne 0 ]; then
echo -e "FogBugz case number is missing in the comment.\n" 1>&2
echo -e "Please add text 'FB: CASE_NUMBER' to your comment." 1>&2
exit 1
fi
exit 0