Start or Pre commit hook?

As part of our automated build process, I provide a list of branches/versions that can be compiled. With Visual Source Safe I just wrote a script to use the SourceOffSite client and read all the versionNo.h’s from certain folders and generate an XML file. With SVN it seems like I could improve on that by making it so that any commits of “versionNo.h” would automatically set a property on the top-level folder and then my build tool could just read properties rather than having to fetch versionNo.h from each folder and scan it.

Only I’m new to SVN so … Would I do that client side or in a start commit hook or a pre commit hook?

Subversion

Well, we went ahead and did it; switched from Visual Source Safe to Subversion. Ahh. The producers see TortoiseSVN and want it, so our data will be going over soon too. Right now we’re running VisualSVN server on our Windows file server and their client for Visual Studio.

I’m now trying to set up commit hooks and running into brick walls. I wanted to avoid having to write something myself and though the Ruby commit-mailer.rb sounded promising. Except, it appears that Ruby no-longer ships with ruby-svn and I can’t figure out where the heck you would get it from.

So, I guess I’ll do something with the Perl version. That’s not so bad, really, I can make it announce commits to the IRC server while I’m at it :) Or, more likely, have it write the announcements to a database and let something else pick them up.