And want this instead:

Color SVN diff

Just a matter of installing a package:

1. Install colordiff ( use the package manager of your choosing, Ubuntu has apt-get, Fedora has yum):
yum install colordiff

2. Instead of this:
svn diff path/to/file.rb

do this:
svn diff path/to/file.rb $* | colordiff

Use this if you want to depend on the GNU diff program. If you trust colordiff enough, use this:

svn diff path/to/file.rb --dif-cmd colordiff

3. That’s it. Done!

Here is a step by step process that you can follow to install Subversion 1.6.6 (This post assumes that you are on a Red Hat / Fedora or equivalent platform and have the GCC build environment ready.)

0. Basics. For extracting different archives:

tar xvjf foo.tar.bz2
tar xvzf foo.tar.gz
gunzip foo.gz
unzip foo.zip


1. Install Apache Portable Runtime libraries: apr, apr-devel, apr-util, apr-util-devel

First lets check if we already have it:

[root@myhost workdir]# rpm -qa | grep apr
apr-1.2.12-2.fc9.i386
apr-devel-1.2.12-2.fc9.i386
xorg-x11-drv-dynapro-1.1.2-1.fc9.i386
apr-util-devel-1.2.12-7.fc9.i386
apr-util-1.2.12-7.fc9.i386


Bingo! I have have all of them. But, if you don’t, no problemo! You can install these using your default package manager:


[root@myhost workdir]# yum install apr apr-devel apr-util apr-util-devel
# Listing all the 4 is not required. Almost always, a 'foo-devel' package has a dependency on 'foo'. So this is enough
[root@myhost workdir]# yum install apr-devel apr-util-devel


2. Install neon or serf. For this, download the source tarball of neon with version as suggested by subversion ( neon-0.29 for subversion-1.6.6) and install it with following commands ( Check if you already have, using commands similar to Step 1):


[root@myhost neon-0.29]# ./configure --with-ssl
[root@myhost neon-0.29]# make
[root@myhost neon-0.29]# make install


3. Install sqlite-amalgamation. Get source from here. Extract it to the directory of your choice. I would say: “/path/to/new/sqlite/” And do a normal install:


[root@myhost sqlite-3.6.13]# ./configure
[root@myhost sqlite-3.6.13]# make
[root@myhost sqlite-3.6.13]# make install


4. Compile and install subversion. Configuration step is important. Change to directory where you extracted subversion.

[root@myhost subversion-1.6.6]# ./configure --with-ssl --with-neon=/usr/local --with-sqlite=/path/to/new/sqlite/sqlite3.c
[root@myhost subversion-1.6.6]# make
[root@myhost subversion-1.6.6]# make install


If you retrying the install, its a good idea to clean previous attempts:


[root@myhost subversion-1.6.6]# make clean



svn diff --old=path/to/changed/dir@OLD_REV_NO --new=path/to/changed/dir@NEW_REV_NO
svn diff --old=path/to/changed/file.extension@OLD_REV_NO --new=path/to/changed/file.extension@NEW_REV_NO


This comes in very handy when comparing Production environment with Development environment.