Subversion: Repository Has Not Been Enabled To Accept Revision Propchanges
Last night I set up Subversion on my main development machine, which is running Vista. To do this, I followed the steps outlined by Jeff Atwood on his Coding Horror blog. His article was very helpful – it allowed me to install Subversion rather painlessly, despite the few HTML glitches I encountered in his instructions.
This morning, I opened the “Show log” page for a particular file using TortoiseSVN, and noticed one of the revisions I checked in was missing a comment. I right-clicked it, and selected “Edit log message”, wanting to add a comment then and there. A little text editor popped up, and I typed the message. After I pressed OK, I was hit with this:

“Repository has not been enabled to accept revision propchanges; ask the administrator to create a pre-revprop-change hook”
Solution
To correct this, I needed to create a file in the “hooks” folder of my Subversion repository. On my system, it was located at C:\svn\repository\hooks. I created a file called “pre-revprop-change.bat”, and I set the contents to this:
rem Only allow log messages to be changed.
if “%4” == “svn:log” exit 0
echo Property ‘%4’ cannot be changed >&2
exit 1
This solution was suggested in the TortoiseSVN documentation.
After saving the file with those contents, I was able to edit the revision comments without encountering the error message.
See Also
TortoiseSVN Users Mailing List: RE: Labels and Comments
TortoiseSVN Documentation: Server side hook scripts
Hey, thanks! That fixed the same error message for me.
Hola, muchas gracias amigo
Esto para mi, fue muy util.
Awesome — a dev just asked to be able to allow this. Found it on my first Google result. Works great!
Great information. Thanks.
Thanks so much! Nice quick fix!
I had the same problem with editing log messages in TortoiseSVN. Your solution solved it. Many thanks!
worked like a charm. cheers.
AMAZING! i wish all my issues could be solved with solutions that were so easy to find!
Brilliant! Works well, but I do have a question though.
In a scenario with various repositories. Is there a way to put this file automatically there each time a new repository is created?
I agree, that’d be an ideal way to fix it. Unfortunately, I’m still fairly new to Subversion, so I don’t know how one would approach this.
Worked great! Thanks.
Old post but still worked for me. If only all solutions were that easy to find! Thanks!
Great, Worked!
I put those lines in the proper hook tab under Visual SVN
If you are running on linux make sure you have the user execute chmod option put on the script file!
The code didn’t work for me as-is. It seems to explicitly “forbid” changes to the Log Message. Here’s my revised code:
rem Only allow log messages to be changed.
if NOT “%4? == “svn:log” exit 0
echo Property ‘%4′ cannot be changed >&2
exit 1
Thank you so much! =)
It worked for me too.
Thanks so much!!
Thanks, it worked!
I added some more lines to aid debugging (and future extension rules)
rem https://mattrefghi.com/blog/solutions/subversion/subversion-repository-has-not-been-enabled-to-accept-revision-propchanges/
set logfile="C:SVN-PRE-REVPROP-CHANGE-HOOK.log"
echo -------------------------------------------------->> %logfile%
echo Running ...SVNhookspre-revprop-change.bat [%time% %date%] >> %logfile%
echo %%1=%1 %%2=%2 %%3=%3 %%4=%4 %%5=%5 >> %logfile%
set REPOS="%1"
set REV="%2"
set USER="%3"
set PROPNAME="%4"
set ACTION="%5"
echo REPOS=%REPOS% REV=%REV% USER=%USER% PROPNAME=%PROPNAME% ACTION=%ACTION% >> %logfile%
rem Only allow log messages to be changed.
if %PROPNAME%=="svn:log" (
echo PROPNAME=svn:log - so changes allowed! >> %logfile%
exit 0
) else (
echo PROPNAME=%PROPNAME% != "svn:log" - so changes NOT allowed! >> %logfile%
echo Property ‘%PROPNAME%’ cannot be changed >&2
echo Changing revision properties other than svn:log is prohibited >>&2
exit 1
)