A quick trick that I'm finding very useful for those little deployments that don't require a full export of the Subversion repository. A little regex on the standard verbose output of the Subversion log like so:

svn log -r HEAD -v | egrep '^ +[A-Z]'

will output a list of the files included in the specified revision, e.g.:

M /trunk/apps/Feedback/views.py
A /trunk/fabfile.py

The letters "A", "M" or "D" denote whether the file was added, modified or deleted.

After the rip-roaring success of our initial forays with StatSVN, we thought how convenient it would be to have these useful statistics generated automatically.

I gave StatSVN a whirl after Alistair recommended it a while back. It's a nifty tool that analyzes Subversion repositories and returns aggregated statistics and graphs. All very interesting and great stuff for a left-brain dominant stats obsessive like me. However, it was recently very useful in helping me convince a client that their change control requirements were maybe going too far.

Just thought I would quickly share a pretty powerful way of backing up subversion repositories.