When we are working on a task, our local modifications are not in repository yet, so it's not safe, I don't want to make branch just for backup, so I wrote a script to backup local modifications, here is the script:

backuptask

#!/bin/bash

if [ -f TASK ] ; then
    echo
else
    echo There is not TASK file here, you must specify the task name in TASK
    exit -1
fi

export task=`cat TASK`
echo Backup Task: $task

# Create task dir if needed
if [ -d ~/tasks/$task ] ; then
    echo
else
    mkdir ~/tasks/$task
fi

svn info > svn.info

datestr=`date "+%Y-%m-%d_%H_%M"`
filename=${task}_${datestr}.tar
list=`svn status`
for line in $list; do
    if [ -f $line ]; then
        tar uvf $filename $line
    fi
done

gzip $filename
filename=$filename.gz

scp $filename yjpark@exobox:~/backup/tasks/
cp $filename ~/tasks/$task/
mv $filename ~/tasks/$task/current.tar.gz

You need to have a file named as 'TASK' in your working directory, it has only one line with the task's name, I put my backups in '~/tasks/' , you can change it if you want, and I scp the backup file to yjpark@exobox, you need to change the user and host name.

Before commit, we need to read the diff, that is done by svn diff, while the result is not easy to read, using kompare, the diff is much easier to read, here is the script I use for this

svndiff

if [ $2 ] ; then
    svn diff --diff-cmd=diff -x "-u10000" -r$1:$2 | kompare -
else
    svn diff | kompare -
fi

If provided two parameters, this command will show svn diff of two revisions, with 10000 lines context(I just want to see the whole file if there is diff, this is useful for doing code reviews), pipeline the output to kompare; otherwise, It will just use kompare to show the output of svn diff,