RabbitVCS compare revisions in SVN doesn't work

[Doug Brown]

Release: Ubuntu 18.04
Package: rabbitvcs-core
Version: 0.16-1.1

There is a bug in Ubuntu's distribution of RabbitVCS 0.16-1.1 which causes it to be completely useless when comparing revisions in SVN repositories. It always checks out the HEAD revision of SVN repositories when doing comparisons, so they always show no changes.

This bug was already fixed upstream. Ubuntu should include it. The bug is definitely present in 18.04. It wasn't a problem with 16.04, which had version 0.16-1.

More information here:
https://askubuntu.com/questions/890091/rabbitvcs-not-displaying-compare-revisions-correctly-with-meld-in-ubuntu-16-10

Here is the GitHub pull request where it was fixed:
https://github.com/rabbitvcs/rabbitvcs/pull/175

[Evgeny Erlihman (evgeny-erlihman)]

Just wanted to add more information on this. It does not look like the root cause of this issue is the same as before.

It looks like when Meld is showing the diff, it shows the head revision of the wanted file and the version from previous revision of the repository, not the file. SO if the file was not modified in the previous commit, it would show as identical.

It should be comparing head revision of the file with previous revision of the file and not the previous commit.

I used same vesrion of rabbitvcs on 16.04, and it worked fine. The problem started happening when i upgraded to 18.04.

[Doug Brown (macg3)]

The root cause of the issue is the same for the problem I'm seeing, because applying the linked GitHub patch fixes my issue. I'm control-clicking two different revisions and then right-clicking and choosing Compare Revisions. In 16.04 (and in 18.04 with the patch applied) it properly compares the two revisions. In 18.04 without the patch, it just checks out the HEAD revision twice and says they're identical.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Gabriele (gabriele-puppis)]

This bug is seriously important for developers.
Why it has not been fixed yet??

[Niccola (meetnick)]

I've found a solution for this issue, please do the following:

## First install official release from Ubuntu repositories: ##

sudo apt install rabbitvcs-nautilus

## Now let's install some dependencies in order to rebuild rabbitvcs from sources: ##

sudo apt install python-configobj python-gobject python-gtkspellcheck python-svn subversion python-dulwich python-pygments git meld

## Get source code, build and install it! ##
git clone https://github.com/rabbitvcs/rabbitvcs.git
cd rabbitvcs
sudo python setup.py install --install-layout=deb

## Now Let's copy RabbitVCS python script to nautilus, so it will appears on nautilus context menu: ##
cd clients/nautilus/
sudo mkdir -p /usr/share/nautilus-python/extensions/
sudo cp RabbitVCS.py /usr/share/nautilus-python/extensions/RabbitVCS.py

## Restart any nautilus still opened ## PLEASE FINISH ANY JOB FIRST
nautilus -q
pgrep -f service.py | xargs kill

## TESTING ##
nohup nautilus > /dev/null &