SVN diff with revision range and changelogs

Question

I'm having problems with SVN and svn diff change lists. In particular, I want to get the change history of a specific list of files for a certain range of changes. SVN change lists seem like the perfect solution, so my approach is:

• svn changelist LIST a.txt b.txt d.txt ...
• svn diff --changelist LIST --revision 2:3

Unfortunately, this includes all files, even those that are not on the change list. Using the same syntax without --revision works fine.

I suspect change lists are for a working copy only and are not considered in history at all. If so, what is the simplest alternative?

Answer 1

According to the SVN book, a chapter on changelogs :

The -changelist option acts only as a filter for the purposes of the Subversion command, and will not add targets to the operation

If you replace the --changelist option for the actual list of files, say a.txt b.txt d.txt ... , you will get the desired result. I believe that the behavior of the command is to use the current working copy directory as the target, and then simply cannot apply a filter to the change list.