This weekend I spent some time trying to get the subversion support for emacs to recognize the "underscore" hack for subversion. In the normal world subversion creates a directory called ".svn" in the directory of code that is under its care. On windows, specifically for websites this is not a good thing as IIS has issues. To handle this subversion can be set up to create a directory named "_svn." Emacs only considers the ".svn" instances and this was causing issues for me at work as it was not correctly identifying svn handled files.

To handle this in the past I would simply search and replace ".svn" with "_svn" in vc-svn.el. Not really an elegant fix. I knew it couldn't be that hard to modify the code to look for either ".svn" or "_svn." The only obstacle was my poor knowlege of emacs lisp. I spent some time playing with it and was able to get the or form to handle it.

I was able to test it this morning at work and it seems to be working as I expected. w00t ++Ari. I sent a patch of my changes to the emacs mailing list and will wait to see what they think of it. for now I have a patch that can be applied to the source during future builds. If they accept the patch then I won't even have to do that. If I'm really lucky they may include my name somewhere in the credits!