Detect Moves

Use Modify|Detect Moves to convert already performed ‘manual’ moves (including renamings) of files to ‘SVN’ moves. Typically, you will not perform moves within SmartSVN itself, but with system commands, through an IDE, etc. One such external move results in a missing and a new unversioned file. Both files could then be added or removed, and committed, which will result in a correct repository content, but will not preserve the relationship between both files (which is actually one moved file). This especially affects the log of the added file: It will start at the committed revision and won’t include the revisions of the removed file. To preserve the relation (and hence history/log), a ‘post-move’ on both files has to be performed. Detect Moves can detect such already performed ‘manual’ moves based on the file content and displays the corresponding suggestions of which files could be ‘post-moved’.

Invoke Detect Moves on a set of missing and unversioned files for which ‘post-move’ should be detected. Depending on the number of selected files, the operation might take a while. The results will be displayed in terms of a list of possible ‘post-moved’ files pairs.

Suggestion displays the detected move in a descriptive manner. If you agree that the corresponding file pair actually represents a move that has happened, keep it selected so the corresponding ‘post-move’ will be performed. Similarity can be helpful for this decision. It is entirely based on the comparison of the file contents and denotes the calculated likelihood for the file pair to be an actual move.

For more details, Target displays the name of the unversioned (i.e. new) file. Source displays the name of the missing (i.e. old) file. If the name of the file has not changed, i.e. Target would be equal to Source, Source is omitted. In the same manner Target Path displays the path of the new file and Source Path displays the path of the old file. Again, Source Path will be omitted if it would be equal to Target Path.

There can also be more than one possible Source for a specific Target. In this case SmartSVN always suggests the best matching Source, i.e. the file for which the highest Similarity value was calculated, and Alternatives shows the number of possible alternative sources. Use Compare to compare the currently selected Source and Target file with the File Compare . Use Alternatives to select an alternative source to be used instead of the original suggestion. Finally, if you consider a particular suggestion and all available Alternatives incorrect, you may deselect the suggestion so that no ‘post-move’ will be performed for the respective target.

Click OK to perform the selected ‘post-moves’.