How to check for increase in LOC on commit?

Question

I've been tasked with finding a way of reporting whenever the LOC/file size of certain files in our project increases when someone tries to commit via SVN.

ie. if a file has 26 LOC and a developer increases this, they should be alerted at compile or commit time.

We already use PMD so I was hoping I could make use of a PMD rule to achieve this but having looked in to it I'm not sure if that's possible with PMD.

Any advice or suggestions would be much appreciated.

Thanks

Answer 1

I suggest you take a look at JavaNCSS. It looks to have a sound notion of what a line of code is ... and it appears to be grammar based. You may need to modify / extend / post-process to compare line count changes over time.

UPDATE

Looks like it only supports up to Java 5/6 language syntax.

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Having said that, if you only want to do this for "certain files" (i.e. a small number), this strikes me as over-engineering. And if you want to do it for large numbers of files, then one has to wonder if someone (your manager perhaps) has a clinical case of metrics obsession disorder. (This is a delusional disorder where people imagine that software metrics are a valid measure of project progress ...)