Currently 'svn log' output shows the number of lines in the log message:
r1729 | jrandom | 2005-07-31 21:12:50 -0500 (Sun, 31 Jul 2005) | 4 lines
The idea was to make log messages unambiguously delimited. Someone could even
write the default log message separator into their log message and we could
still parse 'svn log' output reliably.
In practice, no one ever seems to put the log message separator (a line of 72
dashes) into their log messages. Maybe there are cases in the wild I'm unaware
of. Meanwhile, people sometimes misinterpret the "N lines" as meaning "N lines
were changed in this commit". Oops. If we got rid of that field, we'd have
room for other information -- longer usernames, if nothing else. Or we could
say "N files" instead, a nice summary of the approximate size of the commit. I
dunno, let your imagination run wild.
We could add a restriction to the repository API that a log message may not
contain the separator line. This would be a special favor to one particular
client's output format, which in theory is not something we like to do, but it
might make practical sense in this case.
Task
Major