Apache Subversion FAQ
Apache Subversion FAQ
Translations:
简体中文
These are the questions related to the currently
supported versions
For older questions, see
below
Table of Contents
General questions:
What is Subversion? Why does it exist?
Is Subversion proprietary software?
How stable is Subversion?
What is Subversion's client/server interoperability
policy?
What operating systems does Subversion run
on?
What's all this about a new filesystem? Is
it like ext2?
What kind of hardware do I need to run
a Subversion server?
I heard that Subversion is an Apache
extension? What does it use for servers?
Does this mean I have to set up Apache to
use Subversion?
I run Apache 1.x right now, and can't
switch to Apache 2.0 just to serve Subversion repositories.
Does that mean I can't run a Subversion server?
Why don't you do X, just like SCM system Y?
Why does the entire repository share the
same revision number? I want each of my projects to have their
own revision numbers.
Does Subversion have changesets?
When's the next release?
Does Subversion support symlinks?
I need a high resolution version of the Subversion logo,
where can I get it?
I have other questions. Where can I
get more information?
Why isn't my post showing up on the mailing
list?
Where are the IRC channels?
How is Subversion affected by changes
in Daylight Savings Time (DST)?
How is Subversion affected by SHA-1 hash
collisions?
How-to:
How do I check out the Subversion code?
How do I create a repository? How do I
import data into it?
How do I convert an existing CVS repository
into a Subversion repository?
What if I'm behind a proxy?
I need to put Subversion behind a reverse proxy
My admins don't want me to have a HTTP server for
Subversion. What can I do if I still want remote usage?
How do I manage several different projects
under Subversion?
How do I merge two completely separate repositories?
Should I store my repository / working copy on a
NFS server?
How do I set repository permissions correctly?
How do I completely remove a file from the repository's history?
How do I change the log message for a revision
after it's been committed?
How do I submit a patch for Subversion?
How can I do an in-place 'import'
(i.e. add a tree to Subversion such that the original data becomes
a working copy directly)?
What is this "dump/load cycle" people
sometimes talk about when upgrading a Subversion server?
What can I do about
"svnadmin: E125005: Cannot accept
non-LF line endings in 'svn:log' property"
while running
'svnadmin load'?
How do I allow clients to authenticate against a
Windows domain controller using SSPI Authentication?
I don't like the ".svn" directory name, and
prefer "SVN" or something else. How do I change it?
How do I change the case of a filename?
I can't use tags to merge changes from a
branch into the trunk like I used to with CVS, can I?
Why doesn't the $Revision$
keyword do what I want? It expands to the file's last-changed
revision, but I want something that will expand to the file's
current revision.
Does Subversion have a keyword which behaves
like $Log$ in CVS?
I have a file in my project that every
developer must change, but I don't want those local mods to ever be
committed. How can I make 'svn commit' ignore the file?
When I access a repository using
svn+ssh, my password is not cached in ~/.subversion/auth/. How do
I avoid having to type it so often?
My
svnserve
binary is in a directory that isn't on my
users' default
PATH
s, they use svn+ssh, and I can't figure
out how to modify their
PATH
so that they can run
svnserve
I want to allow access via svn+ssh://, but am paranoid. I hate the
idea of giving each user a login; I would then have to worry about
what they are, and are not, allowed to access on my machine.
How can I set certain properties on
everything in the repository? Also, how can I make sure that every
new file coming into the repository has these properties?
How do I handle spaces in the editor path?
I'm managing a website in my
repository. How can I make the live site automatically update after
every commit?
How do I check out a single
file?
How do I detect adds, deletes,
copies and renames in a working copy after they've already
happened?
How do I run svnserve as a service
on Windows?
How do I convert my repository from using BDB
to FSFS or from FSFS to BDB?
How does Subversion handle binary files?
How can I make
svn diff
show me
just the names of the changed files, not their contents?
How can I use wildcards or globbing to move many files at once?
How can I maintain a modified version (a
"vendor branch") of third-party software using Subversion?
How do I make the contents of a previous
revision become HEAD again?
Troubleshooting:
Every time I try to run a svn
command, it says my working copy is locked. Is my working copy
corrupt?
I'm trying to commit, but Subversion says my
working copy is out of date?
I've contributed a patch to a project and the patch added a new file.
Now
svn update
does not work.
I just built the distribution
binary, and when I try to check out Subversion, I get an error
about an "Unrecognized URL scheme." What's up with that?
I'm getting errors finding or opening a repository,
but I know my repository URL is correct. What's wrong?
When I run `
configure
', I
get errors
subs-1.sed line 38: Unterminated `s' command
. What's wrong?
I'm having trouble building
Subversion under Windows with MSVC++ 6.0. What should I do?
How can I specify a Windows drive letter in
file:
URL?
I'm having trouble doing write
operations to a Subversion repository over a network.
Microsoft Visual Studio 2002 and 2003 seems to have
a problem with the ".svn" directory name. What should I do?
What is the best method of doing a network
trace of the conversation between a Subversion client and server?
Why does the
svn revert
require an
explicit target? Why is it not recursive by default? These
behaviors differ from almost all the other subcommands.
Why does SVN log say "(no author)" for files
committed or imported via Apache (ra_dav)?
I'm getting occasional "Access Denied"
errors on Windows. They seem to happen at random. Why?
On FreeBSD, certain operations (especially
svnadmin create) sometimes hang. Why?
I can see my repository in a web browser, but
'svn checkout' gives me an error about "301 Moved Permanently".
What's wrong?
Compiling with xlc on AIX, I get compilation
errors. What's wrong?
I checked out a directory
non-recursively (with -N), and now I want to make certain
subdirectories "appear". But
svn up subdir
doesn't
work.
I am trying to use mod_dav_svn
with Apache on Win32 and I'm getting an error saying that the
module cannot be found, yet the mod_dav_svn.so file is right
there in
\Apache\modules.
Why aren't my repository hooks working?
Why does my --diff-cmd complain about '-u'?
I tried to override it with --extensions, but it's not working.
How does Subversion cache credentials
(plaintext and encrypted)
I can't hotbackup my repository, svnadmin
fails on files larger than 2Gb!
I cannot see the log entry for the file
I just committed. Why?
Why do I get occasional, seemingly
inconsistent errors when checking out over http:// from a repository
running on MacOS X 10.4 (Tiger)?
I can't build Subversion from working
copy source on Debian GNU/Linux; I get errors at the final link
stage. What's wrong?
I've started
svnserve, but it doesn't seem to be listening on port 3690.
I can't add a directory
because Subversion says it's "already under version control".
Accessing non-public repositories
via svnserve is really slow sometimes.
When performing Subversion
operations involving a lot of data over SSL, I get the error
SSL negotiation failed: SSL error: decryption failed or bad
record mac
I get an error that says "This client is too
old".
Why doesn't
svn switch
work
in some cases?
In Windows, when doing an update with the
command-line client, I get an error saying "The
system cannot find the path specified" and suggesting that my
working copy might be corrupt. But I can update with TortoiseSVN
just fine. What's going on?
I got an error saying "This
client is too old to work with working copy '...' ". How can I
fix it without upgrading Subversion?
I got an error saying
"relocation R_X86_64_32 against `a local symbol' can not be used
when making a shared object" when building the Neon library on 64-bit
Linux.
Why am I getting an error
saying "Could not read response body: Secure connection truncated"
when doing a checkout from Apache?
Why am I getting a tree conflict upon
update even though no one else has committed conflicting changes?
When performing Subversion operations
over SSL, I get the error
SSL handshake failed: SSL error code
-1/1/336032856
I get
Error
validating server certificate
error even though SSL certificates are correctly on the server-side
After importing files to my repository,
I don't see them in the repository directory. Where are they?
When does
svn copy
create
svn:mergeinfo
properties?
Passwords which contain some special
characters do not seem to be working?
Why does an HTTP(S) URL-to-URL copy or
branch/tag operation take a long time?
When performing Subversion operations
over SSL, I get the error
An error occurred during SSL communication
Developer questions:
How do I run the regression tests in a
RAM disk?
How do I run a debugger on
dynamic Subversion binaries without having to install
them?
How do I run a debugger on
Subversion binaries without compiler inlining obfuscating the
source?
References:
What are all the HTTP methods Subversion
uses?
What's a 'bikeshed'?
How do you pronounce "Subversion"?
What's a 'baton'?
What do you mean when you say that
repository is 'wedged'?
What is CVSSv3 and what do the score and vector
mean?
General questions:
What is Subversion? Why does it exist?
Subversion is an open-source, centralized version control system.
See
Our Vision
on our front page to know
why Subversion exists. Want to take a quick look?
See
Quick Start
Is Subversion proprietary software?
No, Subversion is open source / free software. Several companies
(CollabNet, WANdisco, VisualSVN, elego, ...) pay or have paid the salaries
of some full-time developers, but the
software carries an
Apache License
which is fully compliant with
the
Debian
Free Software Guidelines
. In other words, you are free to
download, modify, and redistribute Subversion as you please; no
permission from any company or any person is required.
How stable is Subversion?
Subversion is very stable. It is mature software, with strong
compatibility guarantees
. The Subversion
development community cares deeply about its stability and robustness.
Subversion has been in development since 2000, and became
self-hosting after one year. A year later when we declared "alpha",
Subversion was already being used by dozens of private developers and
shops for real work. After that, it was two more years of bugfixing
and stabilization until we reached 1.0. Most other projects probably
would have called the product "1.0" much earlier, but we deliberately
decided to delay that label as long as possible. We were aware that
many people were waiting for a 1.0 before using Subversion, and had
very specific expectations about the meaning of that label. So we
stuck to that same standard.
What is Subversion's client/server
interoperability policy?
The client and server are designed to work as long as they aren't
more than one major release version apart. For example, any 1.X
client will work with a 1.Y server. However, if the client and
server versions don't match, certain features may not be available.
Such limitations are always documented in the
release notes
of our releases.
Our client/server interoperability policy is documented in the
"Compatibility" section of the
Subversion
Community Guide
What operating systems does Subversion run
on?
All modern flavors of Unix, Windows, BeOS, OS/2, macOS.
Subversion is written in ANSI C and uses APR, the
Apache Portable Runtime
library, as a
portability layer. The Subversion client will run anywhere APR runs,
which is most places. The Subversion server (i.e., the repository
side) is the same, except that it will not host a Berkeley DB repository
on Win9x platforms (Win95/Win98/WinME), because Berkeley DB has
shared-memory segment problems on Win9x. FSFS repositories
(introduced in version 1.1) do not have this restriction; however, due
to a limitation in Win9x's file-locking support, they also don't work
in Win9x.
To reiterate, the Subversion client can be run on any platform
where APR runs. The Subversion server can also be run on any
platform where APR runs, but cannot host a repository on
Win95/Win98/WinMe.
What's all this about a new filesystem? Is
it like ext2?
No. The "Subversion Filesystem" is not a kernel-level filesystem
that one would install in an operating system. Instead, it is
Subversion's repository interface, which is a "versioned filesystem"
in the sense that it stores a directory tree whose state is remembered
from revision to revision. Writing programs to access the repository
is similar to writing programs that use other filesystem APIs. The
main difference is that this particular filesystem doesn't lose data
when written to; old tree states can be retrieved as easily the most
recent state.
What kind of hardware do I need to run a Subversion server?
Server requirements depend on many factors, such as number of
users, frequency of commits and other server related operations,
repository size, and the load generated by custom repository hooks.
When using Apache, it is likely that Apache itself will be the biggest
factor in memory usage.
Remember to take in account other applications running on the same
server; for example, repository browsers use resources too,
independently of Subversion itself.
In general, you can expect to need much less server memory than you
would for comparable CVS repositories.
I heard that Subversion is an Apache
extension? What does it use for servers?
No. Subversion is a set of libraries. It comes with a
command-line client that uses them. There are two different
Subversion server processes: either
svnserve
, which is small
standalone program similar to cvs pserver, or Apache
httpd-2.0
using a special
mod_dav_svn
module.
svnserve
speaks a
custom protocol, while
mod_dav_svn
uses WebDAV as its network
protocol. See
chapter 6
in the Subversion book to learn more.
Does this mean I have to set up Apache to
use Subversion?
The short answer: no.
The long answer: if you just want to access a repository, then you
only need to build a Subversion client. If you want to
host
networked repository, then you need to set up either Apache2 or an
"svnserve" server.
For more details about setting up a network accessible Subversion
server, see
chapter 6
in the Subversion book.
I run Apache 1.x right now, and can't
switch to Apache 2.0 just to serve Subversion repositories.
Does that mean I can't run a Subversion server?
No, you can run
svnserve
as a Subversion server. It works
extremely well.
If you want WebDAV and all the other "goodies" that come with the
Apache server, then yes, you'll need Apache 2.0. It's always an
option to run Apache 2.0 on a different port while continuing to run
Apache 1.x on port 80. Different versions of Apache can happily
coexist on the same machine. Just change the
Listen
directive in httpd.conf from "
Listen 80
" to
Listen 8080
" or whatever port number you want, and make
sure to specify that port when you publish your repository URL (e.g.,
).
Why don't you do X, just like SCM system Y?
Subversion is not attempting to imitate all the features of every
SCM system out there. See
Our Vision
Why does the entire repository share the
same revision number? I want each of my projects to have their
own revision numbers.
First, note that Subversion has no concept of projects. The
repository just stores a versioned directory
tree — you may consider certain sub-trees to be
projects, but Subversion doesn't treat them differently from any other
sub-tree. Thus, the interpretation of what constitutes a project in
the repository is left entirely up to the users. (This is similar to
how
branches
and
tags
are conventions built on top of copies, instead of being
basic concepts built into Subversion itself.)
Each time you commit a change, the repository stores a new revision
of that overall repository tree, and labels the new tree with a new
revision number. Of course, most of the tree is the same as the
revision before, except for the parts you changed.
The new revision number is a sequential label that applies to the
entire new tree, not just to the files and directories you touched in
that revision. However, colloquially, a revision number is used to
refer to the change committed in that revision; for example, "the
change in r588" ("r588" is shorthand for "revision 588") really means
"the difference between repository trees 587 and 588", or put another
way, "the change made to tree 587 to produce tree 588".
Thus, the advancing revision number marks the progress of the
repository as a whole; you generally can't gauge the progress of a
particular project within the repository by watching the revision
number. Also, the revision number should not be used as the
publicly-visible release number of a particular project in the
repository. For that, you should devise some other mechanism of
distinguishing releases, such as using
tags
Does Subversion have Changesets?
The question is a bit loaded, because everyone seems to have a
slightly different definition of "changeset", or a least a slightly
different expectation of what it means for a version control system to
have "changeset features".
For the purposes of this discussion, here's a simple definition of
changeset: it's a collection of changes with a unique name. The
changes might include textual edits to file contents, modifications to
tree structure, or tweaks to metadata. In more common speak, a
changeset is just a patch with a name you can refer to.
Subversion manages versioned trees as first order objects (the
repository is an array of trees), and the changesets are things that
are derived (by comparing adjacent trees.) Systems like Arch or
Bitkeeper are built the other way around: they're designed to manage
changesets as first order objects (the repository is a bag of
patches), and trees are derived by composing sets of patches
together.
Neither philosophy is better in absolute terms: the debate goes
back at least 30 years. The two designs are better or worse for
different types of software development. We're not going to discuss
that here. Instead, here's an explanation of what you can do with
Subversion.
In Subversion, a global revision number 'N' names a tree in the
repository: it's the way the repository looked after the Nth commit.
It's also the name of an implicit changeset: if you compare tree N
with tree N-1, you can derive the exact patch that was committed.
For this reason, it's easy to think of "revision N" as not just a
tree, but a changeset as well. If you use an issue tracker to manage
bugs, you can use the revision numbers to refer to particular patches
that fix bugs -- for example, "this issue was fixed by revision 9238."
Somebody can then run 'svn log -r9238' to read about the exact
changeset which fixed the bug, and run 'svn diff -r9237:9238' to see
the patch itself. And svn's merge command also uses revision numbers.
You can merge specific changesets from one branch to another by naming
them in the merge arguments: 'svn merge -r9237:9238 branchURL' would
merge changeset #9238 into your working copy.
This is nowhere near as complicated as a system built around
changesets as primary objects, but it's still a vast convenience over
CVS.
When's the next release?
See our
Roadmap page
Does Subversion support symlinks?
Subversion 1.1 (and later) has the ability to put a (unix) symlink under
version control, via the usual
svn add
command.
Details: the Subversion repository has no internal concept of a
symlink. It stores a "versioned symlink" as an ordinary file with an
'svn:special' property attached. The svn client (on unix) sees the
property and translates the file into a symlink in the working copy.
On Windows, the svn client currently has no support for translating a
versioned symlink into one of the Windows symlink variants
(junction points etc.). The checked out object appears as a normal file.
One of the issues that make this difficult to support in general is that
by default only Administrators can create symlinks on Windows.
For more information, see
issue SVN-3570
I need a high resolution version of the Subversion logo,
where can I get it?
The following versions of the Subversion logo are available:
An
SVG
version
An
EPS
version
An
Adobe
Illustrator document
Some additional artwork is available in Subversion's source tree under
notes/logo
and in
this Web site
I have other questions. Where can I get more information?
If you don't find an answer after browsing this FAQ, there are several
other resources available:
The Subversion
Book
(free to read online)
The Subversion Users
mailing list
users@subversion.apache.org
full details
including
public archives, subscribe, unsubscribe;
moderated
Why isn't my post showing up on the mailing list?
Our mailing lists are moderated to prevent spam from getting
through, so your first post to any list may be delayed, until the
moderator has a chance to let it through. Once that post is allowed
through, all subsequent posts from the same address are automatically
approved, so you should experience no more delay. Of course, if your
sending address changes, then you'll have to go through moderation
again.
Where are the IRC channels?
Previously there were official IRC channels #svn and #svn-dev on
freenode.net (until May 2021) and on irc.libera.chat (from May 2021). Due to
the low number of participants, we no longer recommend using these channels
for support and/or development questions.
Archives are available
here
How is Subversion affected by changes in Daylight Savings Time (DST)?
Changes to DST do not require any special changes or fixes to
the Subversion code. Subversion primarily uses dates/times to record
when changes have been committed to the repository. This code runs
on the server and gets the current date/time from the operating system
and converts it to UTC using routines provided by the operating system.
The Subversion client receives these dates from the server and converts
them to the local time zone for display using routines provided by
the client operating system. As such, you should only need to install
the patches provided for your operating system and really you should
only need to make sure the time on the server is properly adjusted
for DST.
How is Subversion affected by SHA-1 hash collisions?
Publication of the first known SHA-1 collision by
Google and CWI
unveiled a couple of related issues in Subversion's use
of SHA-1. Subversion's core does not rely on SHA-1 for content indexing,
but it was being used for such purposes in the following supplementary features:
repository data deduplication feature (the "rep cache"), and
content deduplication feature in the working copy.
Speaking of the repository data deduplication feature, this can result in
inability to access files with colliding SHA-1 values or cause data loss for
such files. To prevent different content with identical SHA-1 from being stored
in a repository, upgrade to 1.9.6 or 1.8.18 which, by default, prevent storing
data with such collisions. See our
SHA-1
advisory
for details.
Until the upgrade to these new releases is available, Unix-based servers
can use the pre-commit hook found
here
As an aside, we welcome Windows developers to submit a pre-commit
script for the Windows platform. More information on submission can be found
here
The working copy uses SHA-1 for deduplication of the stored content, and for
performance reasons a client will avoid fetching content with the same SHA-1
checksum. The workaround for this issue is to prevent storage of the colliding
objects in the first place, via upgrade to 1.9.6 or installation of the
aforementioned pre-commit script.
Storing content with SHA-1 collisions is not a supported use case. If you have
content with colliding SHA-1 hash values, we suggest you transform it via gzip
before committing it to avoid the collision altogether. Moreover, an upgrade
to 1.9.6 to prevent future insertion of duplicates is highly recommended.
How-to:
How do I check out the Subversion code?
Use the Subversion client:
$ svn co https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/subversion/trunk subversion
That will check out a copy of the Subversion source tree into a
directory named subversion on your local machine.
How do I create a repository? How do I
import data into it?
See
Quick Start
. For some more detail, see the
quick start instructions in The Subversion Book
For even more detail about repository setup and administration, read
chapter 5 in The Subversion Book
How do I convert an existing CVS repository
into a Subversion repository?
The cvs2svn conversion tool seems to be what most people use. The
sources are hosted at
. If you are running a Linux or
BSD-based system, your distribution might have a cvs2svn package.
If cvs2svn doesn't meet your needs, you might try refinecvs written
by Lev Serebryakov at
What if I'm behind a proxy?
The Subversion client can go through a proxy, if you configure it
to do so. First, edit your "servers" configuration file
to indicate which proxy to use. The files location depends on your
operating system. On Linux or Unix it is located in the directory
"~/.subversion". On Windows it is in "%APPDATA%\Subversion". (Try
"echo %APPDATA%", note this is a hidden directory.)
There are comments in the file explaining what to do. If you don't
have that file, get the latest Subversion client and run any command;
this will cause the configuration directory and template files to be
created.
Next, you need to make sure the proxy server itself supports all
the HTTP methods Subversion uses. Some proxy servers do not support
these methods by default: PROPFIND, REPORT, MERGE, MKACTIVITY,
CHECKOUT. In general, solving this depends on the particular proxy
software. For Squid, the config option is
# TAG: extension_methods
# Squid only knows about standardized HTTP request methods.
# You can add up to 20 additional "extension" methods here.
#Default:
# none
extension_methods REPORT MERGE MKACTIVITY CHECKOUT
(Squid 2.4 and later already knows about PROPFIND.)
See also "
What are all the HTTP methods
Subversion uses?
" for advice on additional HTTP methods to allow
through your proxy.
If it's difficult or impossible to get the proxy to allow
Subversion traffic, but you want to check out the Subversion sources,
you may be able to go around the proxy. Some proxies that filter port
80 nevertheless allow anything on port 81. In many other cases proxies
don't filter https as strict as they filter http. The
svn.apache.org
repository server listens on https as well as http. Try:
svn checkout https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/subversion/trunk subversion
and maybe the proxy will let you through.
Of course, your svn client will have to have been built with ssl
support. You can check to see whether the 'https' scheme is supported by
running
svn --version
I need to put Subversion behind a reverse proxy
A reverse proxy can be used if the Subversion server is not directly
connected to the internet. It will forward HTTP/HTTPS traffic from a public
facing server to the Subversion server, potentially removing HTTPS
encryption. It can also be useful if several different HTTP servers must
be served on the same port.
Subversion uses a subset of the WebDAV/DeltaV protocol; see
this FAQ item
for the details.
As far as the proxy server is concerned, Subversion uses plain WebDAV
protocol. For the
svn copy
and
svn move
commands, an extra
HTTP_DESTINATION header is used; this must be rewritten separately.
Detailed instructions are provided for a few different proxy servers. It
should be fairly easy to copy the ideas from these examples.
Detailed instructions for Apache HTTPD
The information below is based on an article written by Konrad Rosenbaum,
originally found on
. Copied with permission.
The proxy side of Apache requires mod_proxy to work. In many Linux
distributions there are ready-made configuration files that can be activated,
otherwise insert this configuration in httpd.conf:
#load the module
LoadModule proxy_module modules/mod_proxy.so
#per default disallow all requests (for security)
ProxyRequests Off
Order deny,allow
Deny from all
ProxyVia On
In the VirtualHost directive for the proxying virtual host, configure
requests for your subversion directory (we'll assume it is called svn) to be
relayed to the real subversion server:
ProxyPass /svn/ http://realsvnserver/svn/
ProxyPassReverse /svn/ http://realsvnserver/svn/
Order Deny,Allow
Allow from all
Satisfy Any
RewriteCond %{HTTP:Destination} .+/(svn/.*$)
RewriteRule ^/svn/.* - [E=MyDestination:http://realsvnserver/%1,PT]
RequestHeader set Destination %{MyDestination}e env=MyDestination
The ProxyPass directive tells Apache to redirect requests below /svn to
the subversion-Apache (http://realsvnserver/svn). The ProxyPassReverse
directive tells it to alter the request headers (Location, Content-Location,
and URI) to match the target server — depending on your version of Apache and
its configuration you may need to leave out either /svn/ or
servers (otherwise DAV might make trouble). The Limit directive tells Apache
to let all DAV requests from all clients (Allow) through and let the real
subversion server handle authentication (Satisfy). The Rewrite rules
update the HTTP_DESTINATION header to the correct server/protocol.
Detailed instructions for Microsoft IIS
First download and install the URL Rewrite module from
iis.net
. The
example below has been tested with IIS 10 and URL Rewrite 2.1.
Next configure URL Rewrite to allow the HTTP_DESTINATION server variable: In
IIS Manager under URL Rewrite, in the right hand pane click View Server
Variables and add HTTP_DESTINATION.
Finally create a few rewrite rules:
"ToHttps", if you would like to ensure all Subversion traffic is
encrypted, this sends an HTTP redirect to the client if the request is sent
unencrypted.
"ProxyWithDestination", capturing all requests with the HTTP_DESTINATION
server variable (ie. all
svn copy
and
svn move
requests).
The HTTP_DESTINATION header is rewritten and the traffic is forwarded to the
Subversion server.
"ProxyRest", forwarding all other traffic to the Subversion server.
The example below can be copied into web.config. It assumes the Subversion
server is running on port 81 on the same computer as IIS.
My admins don't want me to have a HTTP server for
Subversion. What can I do if I still want remote usage?
A simple option is to use the
svnserve
server instead of
Apache. See
chapter 6
in the Subversion book for details.
However, if your admins don't want you to run Apache, it's very
likely they don't want you to run a custom server process on port 3690
either! So the rest of this answer assumes that your admins
are
okay with you using an existing SSH infrastructure.
If you previously used CVS, you may have used SSH to login to the
CVS server. The ra_svn Subversion access method is the equivalent way
of doing this with Subversion. Just use the "svn+ssh" prefix to your
Subversion repository URL.
$ svn checkout svn+ssh://your.domain.com/full/path/to/repository
This makes your SSH program launch a private 'svnserve' process on
the remote box, which accesses the repository as your UID and tunnels
the information back over the encrypted link.
However, another solution that can be used instead is to leverage
SSH port forwarding to connect to the protected server via ra_dav.
You would connect via SSH to a machine behind your firewall that can
access your Subversion server. Note that this SSH server does
not
have to be the same as where Subversion is installed. It
can be, but it doesn't have to be.
Then, you create a local port forward that connects to the HTTP
server that houses your Subversion repository. You would then
'connect' to the Subversion repository via this local port. Then,
the request will be sent 'tunneled' via SSH server to your Subversion
server.
An example: a Subversion ra_dav setup is behind your company firewall
at 10.1.1.50 (call it svn-server.example.com). Your company allows SSH
access via publicly accessible ssh-server.example.com. Internally, you
can access the Subversion repository via
Example
: client connecting to ssh-server with port-forwarding
and checking out via the port forward
% ssh -L 8888:svn-server.example.com:80 me@ssh-server.example.com
% svn checkout http://localhost:8888/repos/ours
Note that your svn-server.example.com could also have its httpd
instance running on an unprivileged port by a non-trusted user. This
will allow your Subversion server not to require root access.
Joe Orton notes
The server is sensitive to the hostname used in the Destination header
in MOVE and COPY requests, so you have to be a little careful here - a
"ServerAlias localhost" may be required to get this working properly.
Some links on SSH port forwarding
(on archive.org)
How do I manage several different projects under Subversion?
It depends upon the projects involved. If the projects are
related, and are likely to share data, then it's best to create one
repository with several subdirectories like this:
$ svnadmin create /repo/svn
$ svn mkdir file:///repo/svn/projA
$ svn mkdir file:///repo/svn/projB
$ svn mkdir file:///repo/svn/projC
If the projects are completely unrelated, and not likely to share data
between them, then it's probably best to create separate and unrelated
repositories.
$ mkdir /repo/svn
$ svnadmin create /repo/svn/projA
$ svnadmin create /repo/svn/projB
$ svnadmin create /repo/svn/projC
The difference between these two approaches is this (as explained by
Ben Collins-Sussman
In the first case, code can easily be copied or moved around
between projects, and the history is preserved. ('svn cp/mv'
currently only works within a single repository.)
Because revision numbers are repository-wide, a commit to any
project in the first case causes a global revision bump. So it
might seem a bit odd if somebody has 'projB' checked out, notices
that 10 revisions have happened, but projB hasn't changed at
all. Not a big deal, really. Just a little weird at first.
This used to happen to svn everytime people committed to
rapidsvn, when rapidsvn was in the same repository. :-)
The second case might be easier to secure; it's easier to insulate
projects from each other (in terms of users and permissions)
using Apache's access control. In the 1st case, you'll need a
fancy hook script in the repository that distinguishes projects
("is this user allowed to commit to this particular subdir?") Of
course, we already have such a script, ready for you to use.
How do I merge two completely separate repositories?
If you don't care about retaining all the history of one of the
repositories, you can just create a new directory under one project's
repository, then import the other.
If you care about retaining the history of both, then you can use
'svnadmin dump' to dump one repository, and 'svnadmin load' to load it into
the other repository. The revision numbers will be off, but you'll
still have the history.
Peter Davis
equivalent to CVS modules:
As long as the merging takes place in separate directory
trees, you can use svn's version of CVS modules.
Set the
svn:externals
property on a directory to checkout
directories from other repositories whenever the original
directory is checked out. The repository remains separate,
but in the working copy it appears that they have been merged.
If you commit to the imported directory, it will affect the
external repository.
The merge isn't completely clean: the import only affects
working copies, so you won't be able to use a URL in the first
repository to access modules imported from the second. They
remain separate URLs.
There are also some helpful tools floating around on the internet,
to select and reorder revisions when merging
several repositories. For instance the
SvnDumpTool
python classes
for advanced reorganisations.
Should I store my repository / working copy on a NFS
server?
If you are using the
FSFS repository back end
(which has
been the default since Subversion 1.2), then storing the repository on
a modern NFS server (i.e., one that supports locking) should be
fine.
If you are using a repository with the
Berkeley DB back end
(default for repositories created with Subversion 1.0 and 1.1, not the
default thereafter), we recommend
not
storing the repository on
a remote filesystem (for example, NFS). While Berkeley DB databases
and log files can be stored on remote filesystems, the Berkeley DB
shared region files cannot be stored on a remote filesystem, so the
repository may be safely accessed by only a single filesystem client,
and not all Subversion functionality will be available to even that
one client.
Working copies
can be stored on NFS (one common scenario is when
your home directory is on a NFS server). On Linux NFS servers, due to
the volume of renames used internally in Subversion when checking out
files, some users have reported that 'subtree checking' should be
disabled (it's enabled by default). Please see
NFS Howto
Server Guide
and
exports(5)
for more information on how to
disable subtree checking.
We've had at least one report of working copies getting wedged
after being accessed via SMB. The server in question was running a
rather old version of Samba (2.2.7a). The problem didn't recur with a
newer Samba (3.0.6).
How do I set repository
permissions correctly?
Try to have as
few
users access the repository as
possible. For example, run apache or 'svnserve -d' as a specific
user, and make the repository wholly owned by that user. Don't allow
any other users to access the repository via
file:///
urls,
and be sure to run 'svnlook' and 'svnadmin' only as the user which
owns the repository.
If your clients are accessing via
file:///
or
svn+ssh://
, then there's no way to avoid access by multiple
users. In that case, read
the last section in chapter 6
, and pay particular attention to the
"checklist" sidebar at the bottom. It outlines a number of steps to
make this scenario safer.
Note for SELinux / Fedora Core 3+ / Red Hat Enterprise users:
In addition to regular Unix permissions, under SELinux every file,
directory, process, etc. has a 'security context'. When a process
attempts to access a file, besides checking the Unix permissions the
system also checks to see if the security context of the process is
compatible with the security context of the file.
Fedora Core 3, among other systems, comes with SELinux installed by
default, configured so that Apache runs in a fairly restricted
security context. To run Subversion under Apache, you have to set the
security context of the repository to allow Apache access (or turn off
the restrictions on Apache, if you think all this is overkill). The
chcon
command is used to set the security context of files
(similarly to how the
chmod
sets the traditional Unix
permissions). For example, one user had to issue this command
$ chcon -R -h -t httpd_sys_content_t
PATH_TO_REPOSITORY
to set the security context to be able to successfully
access the repository.
How do I completely remove a file from the repository's history?
There are special cases where you might want to destroy all
evidence of a file or commit. (Perhaps somebody accidentally committed
a confidential document.) This isn't so easy, because Subversion is
deliberately designed to never lose information. Revisions are
immutable trees which build upon one another. Removing a revision from
history would cause a domino effect, creating chaos in all subsequent
revisions and possibly invalidating all working copies.
The project has plans, however, to someday implement an
svnadmin
obliterate
command which would accomplish the task of permanently
deleting information. (See
issue
516
.)
In the meantime, your only recourse is to
svnadmin dump
your
repository, then pipe the dumpfile through
svndumpfilter
(excluding the bad path) into an
svnadmin load
command. See
chapter 5
of the Subversion book for details about this.
An alternative approach is to
replicate the repository with
svnsync
after configuring
path-based authorization
rules that deny read access to any paths that need to be filtered from
history. Unlike
svndumpfilter
svnsync
will automatically
translate copy operations with an unreadable source path into normal
additions, which is useful if history involving copy operations needs
to be filtered.
How do I change the log message for a revision after it's been committed?
Log messages are kept in the repository as properties attached to each
revision. By default, the log message property (
svn:log
) cannot be
edited once it is committed. That is because changes to
revision
properties
(of which
svn:log
is one) cause the property's
previous value to be permanently discarded, and Subversion tries to prevent
you from doing this accidentally. However, there are a couple of ways to get
Subversion to change a revision property.
The first way is for the repository administrator to enable revision
property modifications. This is done by creating a hook called
"pre-revprop-change" (see
this section
in the Subversion book for more details about how to do
this). The "pre-revprop-change" hook has access to the old log message
before it is changed, so it can preserve it in some way (for example, by
sending an email). Once revision property modifications are enabled, you
can change a revision's log message by passing the --revprop switch to
svn propedit
or
svn propset
, like either one of these:
$ svn propedit -r N --revprop svn:log URL
$ svn propset -r N --revprop svn:log "new log message" URL
where N is the revision number whose log message you wish to change, and
URL is the location of the repository. If you run this command from within a
working copy, you can leave off the URL.
The second way of changing a log message is to use
svnadmin setlog
This must be done by referring to the repository's location on the filesystem.
You cannot modify a remote repository using this command.
$ svnadmin setlog REPOS_PATH -r N FILE
where REPOS_PATH is the repository location, N is the revision number whose
log message you wish to change, and FILE is a file containing the new log
message. If the "pre-revprop-change" hook is not in place (or you want to
bypass the hook script for some reason), you can also use the --bypass-hooks
option. However, if you decide to use this option, be very careful. You may
be bypassing such things as email notifications of the change, or backup
systems that keep track of revision properties.
How do I submit a patch for Subversion?
FIRST, read the
Subversion
Community Guide
Once you've digested that, send a mail to the dev list with the
word [PATCH] and a one-line description in the subject, and include
the patch inline in your mail (unless your MUA munges it up
totally). Then a committer will pick it up, apply it (making any
formatting or content changes necessary), and check it in.
The basic process looks like this:
$ svn co https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/subversion/site subversion-site
$ cd subversion-site/publish
[ make changes to faq.html ]
$ svn diff faq.html > /tmp/foo
$ Mail -s "[PATCH] FAQ updates" < /tmp/foo
Of course, the email you send should contain a nice long
explanation about what the patch does, as per the
Subversion Community Guide
, but you
already know that, since you read and completely understood
it
before
actually hacking the code, right? :)
Looking for something to do? Take a look at our
ideas page
How can I do an in-place 'import'
(i.e. add a tree to Subversion such that the original data becomes
a working copy directly)?
Suppose, for example, that you wanted to put some of /etc under
version control inside your repository:
# svn mkdir file:///root/svn-repository/etc \
-m "Make a directory in the repository to correspond to /etc"
# cd /etc
# svn checkout file:///root/svn-repository/etc ./
# svn add apache samba alsa X11
# svn commit -m "Initial version of my config files"
This takes advantage of a not-immediately-obvious feature of
svn checkout
: you can check out a directory from the repository
directly into an existing directory. Here, we first make a new empty directory
in the repository, and then check it out into
/etc
, transforming
/etc
into a working copy. Once that is done, you can use normal
svn add
commands to select files and subtrees to add to the
repository.
If the
entire
contents of the directory shall be imported,
rather than a subset of contents, this shorter sequence of commands
can be used to perform the import and then transform the directory into
a Subversion working copy:
# cd /etc
# svn import file:///root/svn-repository/etc
# svn checkout --force file:///root/svn-repository/etc .
There is an issue filed for enhancing
svn import
to
be able to convert the imported tree to a working copy automatically;
see
issue 1328
What is this "dump/load cycle" people
sometimes talk about when upgrading a Subversion server?
Subversion's repository database schema has changed occasionally
during development. To take advantage of new features, you may have
to dump and load the repository to recreate the back-end database.
However, most upgrades of Subversion do
not
involve a
dump and load. When one is required, the release notes and the
CHANGES file for the new version will carry prominent notices about
it. If you don't see such a notice, then there has been no schema
change, and no dump/load is necessary.
An alternative to dump/load is using
svnsync
to replicate the repository into a new one. This is a bit
slower, but is more flexible, and has some extra normalization-features
which are not (yet) available with dump/load (svnsync normalizes properties
to LF line-endings on the fly and has a --source-prop-encoding option
to convert them to UTF-8, which is required in newer repository formats
--- see below for how to handle this with dump/load).
Note:
Both dump/load and svnsync
only cover the repository
database, not the repository hook scripts, configuration files and
locks
. These need to be copied over manually from source to target
(see below in the "complex procedure").
If you need to copy the complete repository, without rebuilding the back-end
database,
svnadmin hotcopy
may be a better option.
For small repositories that can afford some downtime, this is a
simple dump/load procedure to upgrade from Subversion version X to Y (
see below for a more complex procedure with minimal downtime for larger
repositories):
Shut down svnserve, Apache, and anything else that might be
accessing the repository.
svnadmin dump /path/to/repository > dumpfile.txt
using version X of svnadmin.
mv /path/to/repository /path/to/saved-old-repository
Now upgrade to Subversion Y (i.e., build and install Y, replacing X).
svnadmin create /path/to/repository
, using version
Y of svnadmin.
svnadmin load /path/to/repository < dumpfile.txt
again using version Y of svnadmin.
Copy over hook scripts, etc, from the old repository to the new one.
Restart svnserve, Apache, etc.
For larger repositories, where you want to minimize the maintenance window,
a slightly more complex procedure can be used. The trick is to
dump+load to a new location, while the old repository is still
accessible (for checkouts and commits). After this is done (can take
hours, or even days, weeks) you note the last revision which was
loaded (or check the revision number with 'svnlook youngest
newrepos'), and start another dump+load where you dump with
'--incremental -rNEXTREV:HEAD' (where NEXTREV is the next revision
that needs to be dumped). You can iterate over this as long as you keep the old repository open
... At the end you make the original repository inaccessible for a
couple of minutes, while you enable the new one (Caveat: if you move
your new repos in the same disk location as the old one, and you use
Apache httpd to serve it, make sure you restart httpd to reset its
caches).
Tip: for a large repo I strongly suggest building the new repository
(the target of your 'svnadmin load') on very fast storage, even
ramdisk if possible, and running 'svnadmin pack' while on fast storage
(and copy it over to the final disk afterwards). It's
the 'svnadmin load' part that is very time-consuming right now (this
will probably be much improved in svn 1.10, with the
--no-flush-to-disk option for 'svnadmin load').
Your commands will look like the following:
svnadmin create NEWREPOS
(maybe create it on a ramdisk)
If you have custom hook scripts in
OLDREPOS/hooks
(all files
not ending in .tmpl, as those are the default templates), review them,
and copy them over to
NEWREPOS/hooks
. Check the new templates
corresponding to your custom hook scripts to see if there are new options
and comments (you might want to copy the newer comments from the template
into your custom hook script, to keep it up to date). Make sure the files are
not changed anymore until the end of the entire procedure (or carry over
additional changes at the end).
Review and copy config files from
OLDREPOS/conf
to
NEWREPOS/conf
(here too, take a look at the new
"default config files" to see if there are new interesting options or
comments). Make sure the files are not changed anymore until the end of the
entire procedure (or carry over additional changes at the end).
svnadmin dump -M 1024 OLDREPOS | svnadmin load -M 1024 NEWREPOS
(initial dump+load; you might want to pass -q to dump and/or load
to make it more quiet)
(the -M 1024 gives the process 1024 MB extra ram for caching)
svnlook youngest NEWREPOS
(last revision that was loaded -> NEXTREV is this last revision + 1)
svnadmin dump --incremental -rNEXTREV:HEAD -M 1024 | svnadmin load
-M 1024 NEWRPOS
Make OLDREPOS read-only or completely unavailable
<-- start of maintenance window
Possibly repeat the incremental dump+load of steps 5 and 6 (if new commits
happened after you started 6).
Copy locks from
OLDREPOS/db/locks
to
NEWREPOS/db/locks
. Something like 'cp -rp SOURCE TARGET'
works fine for this.
Note: this step may take a couple of minutes during
your maintenance window, depending on the size of the directory tree
and the speed of the disk(s). If you want to make sure, test this in
advance (but make sure the source repository is readonly when you do
the final copy / sync, otherwise the locks might be changed after your
copy).
Put NEWREPOS online
<-- end of maintenance window
Some things to watch out for:
Watch out for
changes to log messages
(or other revision properties) after you start the initial dump+load and
before you lock down the old repository.
Those won't be transferred with the incremental dump+load(s).
So either make sure the pre-revprop-change hook is "closed" while you're
running the initial dump+load, or keep a log of all changed revision
properties (for instance write them to a log file from your
post-revprop-change hook) and transfer them to the new repository
afterwards (for instance using 'svnlook log' and 'svnadmin setlog').
You might run into:
svnadmin: E125005: Invalid property value found in dumpstream; consider repairing the
source or using --bypass-prop-validation while loading.
svnadmin: E125005: Cannot accept non-LF line endings in '
svn:log
' property
This means the svn:log message of the revision has non-LF line endings (these
were accepted by older servers, but no longer as of Subversion 1.6).
You can ignore this minor corruption by adding --bypass-prop-validation
to your 'svnadmin load' command (you can always
repair
this later in the
new repository). Or you can try to
repair
this
in the source repository
before executing the dump+load (since svn:log is a
revision property
it can easily be fixed without "rewriting history").
You might run into:
svnadmin: E125005: Invalid property value found in dumpstream; consider repairing the
source or using --bypass-prop-validation while loading.
svnadmin: E125005: Cannot accept non-LF line endings in '
svn:ignore
' property
This is more difficult to repair, because 'svn:ignore' is not a
revision property (unlike svn:log, which can be manipulated with
svnadmin setrevprop), but a
versioned property
(so it's part of
history). Again, you can ignore this with --bypass-prop-validation.
But since this is a corruption "in history", this can only be repaired
with a dump+load, so this might be a good time to try and fix this (or
you'll run into this again in the future). To repair it you can use
a tool like
svndumptool
But it only works on dump
files
, not as part of a pipe. So a possible
way to go about it is: dump that single
(corrupt) revision to a file, repair it ('svndumptool.py eolfix-prop
svn:ignore svn.dump svn.dump.repaired'), load that single dumpfile,
and then continue with a new "piped" command (like step (6) above).
See
this section of the Subversion book
for more details on dumping and
loading.
What can I do about
"svnadmin: E125005: Cannot accept non-LF line endings
in 'svn:log' property"
while running 'svnadmin load'?
This error means the svn:log message of the revision in your
dumpfile / dumpstream has non-LF line endings (these
were accepted by older servers, but no longer as of Subversion 1.6).
You can ignore this minor corruption while loading into your new
repository by adding --bypass-prop-validation to your 'svnadmin load'
command (you can always repair this later in the
new repository). Or you can try to repair this in the source repository
before executing the dump+load (since svn:log is a
revision property
it can easily be fixed without "rewriting history"). Also note that
svnsync
normalizes this on the fly, so it might be an easier
alternative than dump+load.
There is no standard procedure for normalizing the line endings in
the svn:log property, but using the administrative commands 'svnlook propget',
'svnlook log' and 'svnadmin setlog' can get you there:
svnlook propget -r$REV --revprop $REPOS svn:log
gets the
raw svn:log revision property (no normalization, no extra newline at the end).
You can use that to validate it and search for 'non-LF line endings'.
svnlook log -r$REV $REPOS
gets a normalized version of it
(LF-eols, normalized to UTF8 (if you have the correct "source encoding" set
as your locale), and an extra newline at the end). If you strip of the final
newline, this gives you a nice normalized version of the log message to
feed to ...
svnadmin setlog -r$REV $REPOS --bypass-hooks
(or without
the --bypass-hooks option if you want the hooks to be run) will set the value
it's reading from stdin as the new log message.
You can stitch them together into a script to handle all revisions
in a repository, like in these bash oneliners:
Find the "broken" revisions and echo the revision numbers:
bash$ YOUNGEST=`svnlook youngest $REPOS`; for (( i=1; i<=$YOUNGEST; i++ )); \
do svnlook propget -r $i --revprop $REPOS svn:log | xxd -ps -c1 | fgrep '0d' > /dev/null \
&& echo "$i" ; done; echo "Verified until revision $YOUNGEST"
Find and immediately fix the "broken" revisions with 'svnadmin setlog':
bash$ YOUNGEST=`svnlook youngest $REPOS`; for (( i=1; i<=$YOUNGEST; i++ )); \
do svnlook propget -r $i --revprop $REPOS svn:log | xxd -ps -c1 | fgrep '0d' > /dev/null \
&& echo "Fixing r$i" && svnadmin setlog $REPOS --bypass-hooks -r$i \
<( svnlook log -r$i $REPOS | sed '$d' ); done; echo "Verified until revision $YOUNGEST"
(the "sed '$d'" strips off the extra newline that's added by "svnlook log")
How do I allow clients to authenticate against a
Windows domain controller using SSPI authentication?
This FAQ entry has not been updated since 2003 and is known to contain information no longer accurate or relevant.
TortoiseSVN
has an excellent
document that describes setting up a Subversion server on Windows. Go to
to see the section on SSPI authentication.
An important part of the configuration is the line:
SSPIOfferBasic On
Without this line, browsers that support SSPI will prompt for the user's
credentials, but clients that do not support SSPI such as Subversion
will not prompt. (The current release of Neon - Subversion's HTTP
library - handles only basic authentication.) Because the client never
asks for credentials, any action that requires authentication will fail.
Adding this line tells
mod_auth_sspi
to use basic authentication with
the client, but to use the Windows domain controller to authenticate
the credentials.
I don't like the ".svn" directory name, and
prefer "SVN" or something else. How do I change it?
We recommend that you live with ".svn" if you possibly can.
However, if you are using Visual Studio 2002 or 2003 under Windows, you might
need to set the environment variable SVN_ASP_DOT_NET_HACK, as
described
here
Or you could use a completely custom name for the administrative
directory. We recommend against this, because your working copy would
probably not work with Subversion clients other than the one you
customized. However, if you absolutely must do this, just change this
line in
subversion/include/svn_wc.h
from
#define SVN_WC_ADM_DIR_NAME ".svn"
to (for example)
#define SVN_WC_ADM_DIR_NAME "SVN"
then recompile your client.
How do I change the case of a filename?
This problem comes up in two situations. If you're adding files on
an operating system with a case-insensitive filesystem, such as
Windows, you might find you accidentally add a file with the wrong
case in the filename. Alternatively, you may just decide to change
the case of an existing file in the repository.
If you're working in a case-sensitive file system, this is no
problem at all. Just move the file to the new name, e.g.,
svn mv file.java File.java
From Subversion 1.7 onwards, this also works on Windows, even though
it's using a case-insensitive filesystem.
If you are using Subversion 1.6 or older on Windows, or if you're
using a case-insensitive filesystem with an operating system other than
Windows, this technique won't work. In this case, you can accomplish
this by copying the file
somewhere temporary, deleting the file from Subversion, then adding
the copy with the correct case. Or a better way is to perform a move
operation with Subversion URLs. Using URLs is recommended, because it
will preserve history for the file, and will take effect
immediately.
Both ways will leave Windows working copies with problems, however,
because Windows can still get confused when trying to update the
conflicting filenames. (You'll get a message like
svn: Failed to
add file 'File.java': object of the same name already
exists
). One way of fixing the problem is to delete your working
copy and check out again. If you do not want to do this, you must
perform a two step update.
For each file with the wrong case, the following command will change
the case:
svn mv svn://svnserver/path/to/file.java svn://svnserver/path/to/File.java
To update the working copy, change to the relevant directory and do:
svn update file.java
svn update
The first update will remove
file.java
from your working
copy, the second update will add
File.java
, leaving you with
a correct working copy. Or if you had a lot of problematic files, you
can update the working copy this way:
svn update *
svn update
As you can see, adding a file with the wrong case is tricky to fix on
an operating system that has a case insensitive filesystem. Do try to
get it right when you add the file the first time! To prevent the
problem from occurring in the first place, you can create a pre-commit hook that
calls the file
case-insensitive.py
. That file lives
in the Subversion
source tarball, in the directory
contrib/hook-scripts
or can be
downloded from the
repository
I can't use tags to merge changes from a
branch into the trunk like I used to with CVS, can I?
As shown below it is possible to merge from a branch to the trunk
without remembering one revision number. Or vice versa (not shown in the
example).
The example below presumes an existing repository in
/home/repos
in which you want to start a branch named
bar
containing a file
named
foo
you are going to edit.
For the purpose of tracing branch merges, this repository has set up
tags/branch_traces/
to keep tags.
# setup branch and tags
$ svn copy file:///home/repos/trunk \
file:///home/repos/branches/bar_branch \
-m "start of bar branch"
$ svn copy file:///home/repos/branches/bar_branch \
file:///home/repos/tags/branch_traces/bar_last_merge \
-m "start"
# checkout branch working copy
$ svn checkout file:///home/repos/branches/bar_branch wc
$ cd wc
# edit foo.txt file and commit
$ echo "some text" >>foo.txt
$ svn commit -m "edited foo"
# switch to trunk and merge changes from branch
$ svn switch file:///home/repos/trunk
$ svn merge file:///home/repos/tags/branch_traces/bar_last_merge \
file:///home/repos/branches/bar_branch
# Now check the file content of 'foo.txt', it should contain the changes.
# commit the merge
$ svn commit -m "Merge change X from bar_branch."
# finally, update the trace branch to reflect the new state of things
$ svn delete -m "Remove old trace branch in preparation for refresh." \
file:///home/repos/tags/branch_traces/bar_last_merge
$ svn copy file:///home/repos/branches/bar_branch \
file:///home/repos/tags/branch_traces/bar_last_merge \
-m "Reflect merge of change X."
Why doesn't the $Revision$
keyword do what I want? It expands to the file's last-changed revision,
but I want something that will expand to the file's current revision.
Subversion increments the revision number of the repository as a
whole, so it can't expand any keyword to be that number - it would
have to search and possibly modify every file in your working copy on
every update and commit.
The information you want (the revision of your working copy) is
available from the command
svnversion
; it gives you
information on the revision level of a working copy given a path (see
svnversion --help
for details).
You can incorporate it into your build or release process to get the
information you need into the source itself. For example, in a build
environment based on
GNU make
, add
something like this
to your
Makefile
##
## To use this, in yourfile.c do something like this:
## printf("this program was compiled from SVN revision %s\n",SVN_REV);
##
SVNDEF := -D'SVN_REV="$(shell svnversion -n .)"'
CFLAGS := $(SVNDEF) ... continue with your other flags ...
(Note that this will not work on non-GNU versions of
make
Don't use it if your build process needs to be portable.)
Or try this recipe:
##
## on every build, record the working copy revision string
##
svn_version.c: FORCE
echo -n 'const char* svn_version(void) { const char* SVN_Version = "' \
> svn_version.c
svnversion -n . >> svn_version.c
echo '"; return SVN_Version; }' >> svn_version.c
##
## Then any executable that links in
svn_version.o
will be able
## to call the function
svn_version()
to get a string that
## describes exactly what revision was built.
##
Windows users may want to use
SubWCRev.exe
, available from
the
TortoiseSVN
download page
; it replaces all
$WCREV$
tags in a given
file with the current working copy revision.
Another alternative is creating a wrapper for 'svn commit', which does some
automatic replacement in files before commit (be careful not to mess
things up though -- silent manipulation of files right before commit can
be scary for a user). That way you can inject any metadata you want (and
it will be committed with the regular content of the file into the
repository).
Does Subversion have a keyword which
behaves like $Log$ in CVS?
No. There is no equivalent for the $Log$ keyword in CVS. If you
want to retrieve a log for a specific file, you can run
'svn log your-file-name' or 'svn log url-to-your-file'.
From the mailing list some explanations why $Log$ is bad:
"$Log$ is a total horror the moment you start merging changes
between branches. You're practically guaranteed to get conflicts there,
which -- because of the nature of this keyword -- simply cannot be
resolved automatically."
And:
Subversion log messages are mutable, they can be changed by setting
the svn:log revision property. So the expansion of $Log:$ in any
given file could be out of date. Update may well need to retrieve the
appropriate log message for each occurrence of the $Log:$ keyword,
even if the file that contained it was not otherwise updated.
I don't care about that. I want to use it anyway.
Will you implement it?
No. There are no plans to implement it ourselves or accept patches
which implement this feature. If you want to distribute your files
with some kind of changelog included, you might be able to work
around this limitation in your build system.
I have a file in my project that every
developer must change, but I don't want those local mods to ever be
committed. How can I make 'svn commit' ignore the file?
The answer is: don't put that file under version control. Instead,
put a
template
of the file under version control, something
like "file.tmpl".
Then, after the initial 'svn checkout', have your users (or your
build system) do a normal OS copy of the template to the proper
filename, and have users customize the copy. The file is unversioned,
so it will never be committed. And if you wish, you can add the file
to its parent directory's svn:ignore property, so it doesn't show up
as '?' in the 'svn status' command.
When I access a repository using
svn+ssh, my password is not cached in ~/.subversion/auth/. How do
I avoid having to type it so often?
ssh has its own passphrases and its own authentication-caching
scheme. Its auth caching is external to Subversion, and must be set
up independently of Subversion.
OpenSSH includes
ssh-keygen
to create the keys,
ssh-agent
to cache passphrases, and
ssh-add
to add passphrases to the agent's cache. A
popular script to simplify usage of
ssh-agent
is
keychain
. On Windows,
PuTTY
is a
popular alternative ssh client; see
PuTTYgen
to import
OpenSSH keys and
pageant
to cache passphrases.
Setting up
ssh-agent
is outside the scope of this
document, but a
Google search for "ssh-agent"
will quickly get you answers.
My
svnserve
binary is in a directory that isn't on my
users' default
PATH
s, they use svn+ssh, and I can't figure
out how to modify their
PATH
so that they can run
svnserve
Note: this all assumes you're using OpenSSH. There are other
ssh implementations out there, and presumably they will allow
you to do something similar, but we don't yet know the details.
You've tried fiddling with their various login files, like
.bash_profile
, and nothing works! That's because ssh
ignores those files when the Subversion client invokes it.
But there's no need to modify
PATH
; instead, you can
directly give ssh the full name of the
svnserve
command.
Here's how to do it:
For each user who needs svn+ssh access, generate a new ssh
public-key pair which they will use
only
for
Subversion—not for logging in normally. Have them give
the keypair a distinctive name, like
~/.ssh/id_dsa.subversion
. Add the public part of the
key to their
~/.ssh/authorized_keys
file on the
server machine, after first inserting a bit of magic at the
beginning of the line before the word
ssh-rsa
or
ssh-dss
, like this:
before
ssh-dss AAAAB3Nblahblahblahblah
after
command="/opt/subversion/bin/svnserve -t" ssh-dss AAAAB3Nblahblahblahblah
Obviously, replace
/opt/subversion/bin/svnserve
with
whatever is appropriate for your system. You also might want to
specify the full path to the Subversion repository in the
command (by using the
-r
option), to save your users
some typing.
The
command=
magic causes sshd on the remote machine
to invoke
svnserve
, even if your user tries to run
some other command. See the sshd(8) man page (section
AUTHORIZED_KEYS FILE FORMAT
) for details.
Now when your users run the Subversion client, make sure they
have an
SVN_SSH
environment variable that "points to"
the private half of their keypair, by doing something like this
(for the Bourne Again shell):
SVN_SSH="ssh -i $HOME/.ssh/id_dsa.subversion"
export SVN_SSH
This
file
discusses this topic in more detail.
I want to allow access via svn+ssh://, but am paranoid. I hate the
idea of giving each user a login; I would then have to worry about
what they are, and are not, allowed to access on my machine.
See the section about hacking
the
~/.ssh/authorized_keys
file in the answer
to
this other question
; ignore the stuff
about getting
svnserve
on your PATH.
How can I set certain properties on
everything in the repository? Also, how can I make sure that every
new file coming into the repository has these properties?
Subversion will not change a file's contents by default; you have
to deliberately set the
svn:eol-style
or
svn:keywords
property on a file for that to happen. That
makes Subversion a lot safer than CVS's default behavior, but with
that safety comes some inconvenience.
Answering the first question: to set properties on all files
already in the repository, you'll need to do it the hard way. All you
can do is run
svn propset
on every file (in a working copy),
and then
svn commit
. Scripting can probably help you with
this.
But what about future files? Unfortunately, there's no server
mechanism to automatically set properties on files being committed.
This means that all of your users need to remember to set certain
properties whenever they
svn add
a file. Fortunately,
there's a client-side tool to help with this. Read about the
auto-props
feature in the book. You need to make sure all your
users configure their clients' auto-props settings appropriately.
You could write a pre-commit hook script to reject any commit which
forgets to add properties to new files (see
for example). However, this approach may be overkill. If somebody
forgets to set
svn:eol-style
, for example, it will be noticed
the minute somebody else opens the file on a different OS. Once
noticed, it's easy to fix: just set the property and commit.
Note: many users have asked for a feature whereby the server
automatically "broadcasts" run-time settings to clients, such as
auto-props settings. There's already a feature request filed for this
issue
1974
), though this feature is still being debated by developers,
and isn't being worked on yet.
How do I deal with spaces in the editor path? Also, how can
I define command line options for the editor?
The Subversion command line client will invoke the editor defined
in the environment variable SVN_EDITOR. This environment variable
is passed directly to the operating system along with the name of a
temporary file used to enter/edit the log message.
Due to the fact that the SVN_EDITOR string is passed as-is to the
system's command shell, spaces in the editor name, or in the path name
to the editor, will not work unless the editor name is in quotes.
For example, on Windows if your editor is in
C:\Program Files\Posix Tools\bin\vi
you would
want to set the variable as follows:
set SVN_EDITOR="C:\Program Files\Posix Tools\bin\vi"
Note that there is no need to escape the quotes in the Windows
shell as they are not part of the syntax for the
set
command.
On UNIX systems you would need to follow your shell's specific
methods for setting the variable. For example, in a bash shell,
the following should work:
SVN_EDITOR='"/usr/local/more editors/bin/xemacs"'
export SVN_EDITOR
In case a command line option would be needed for the invocation
of the editor, just add that after the editor name in the SVN_EDITOR
environment variable just like you would use on the command line.
For example, if the options
-nx -r
would be wanted for
the above editors, the following will provide those options:
For Windows:
set SVN_EDITOR="C:\Program Files\Posix Tools\bin\vi" -nx -r
For UNIX/bash:
SVN_EDITOR='"/usr/local/more editors/bin/xemacs" -nx -r'
export SVN_EDITOR
Note that SVN_EDITOR is the Subversion specific environment variable
setting for the editor selection. Subversion also supports
using the more generic EDITOR variable but if you need special behaviors
with Subversion it is best to use the SVN_EDITOR variable.
I'm managing a website in my
repository. How can I make the live site automatically update after
every commit?
This is done all the time, and is easily accomplished by adding a
post-commit hook script to your repository. Read about hook scripts
in
Chapter 5
of the book. The basic idea is to make the "live site"
just an ordinary working copy, and then have your post-commit hook
script run 'svn update' on it.
In practice, there are a couple of things to watch out for. The
server program performing the commit (svnserve or apache) is the same
program that will be running the post-commit hook script. That means
that this program must have proper permissions to update the working
copy. In other words, the working copy must be owned by the same user
that svnserve or apache runs as -- or at least the working copy must
have appropriate permissions set.
If the server needs to update a working copy that it doesn't own
(for example, user joe's ~/public_html/ area), one technique is create
a +s binary program to run the update, since Unix won't allow scripts
to run +s. Compile a tiny C program:
#include
#include
#include
int main(void)
execl("/usr/local/bin/svn", "svn", "update", "/home/joe/public_html/",
(const char *) NULL);
return(EXIT_FAILURE);
... and then
chmod +s
the binary, and make sure it's owned
by user 'joe'. Then in the post-commit hook, add a line to run the
binary.
If you have problems getting the hook to work, see
"Why aren't my repository hooks
working?"
Also, you'll probably want to prevent apache from exporting the
.svn/ directories in the live working copy. Add this to your
httpd.conf
# Disallow browsing of Subversion working copy administrative dirs.
Order deny,allow
Deny from all
Finally, if the working copy to be updated isn't on the same machine as
the Subversion server,
svnpubsub
can be used on the Subversion server to advertise the commit to a
listening
svnwcsub
client on the Web server.
How do I check out a single file?
Subversion does not support checkout of a single file, it only
supports checkout of directory structures.
However, you can use 'svn export' to export a single file. This will
retrieve the file's contents, it just won't create a versioned working
copy.
How do I detect adds, deletes,
copies and renames in a working copy after they've already
happened?
You don't. It's a bad idea to try.
The basic design of the working copy has two rules: (1) edit files
as you please, and (2) use a Subversion client to make any
tree-changes (add, delete, move, copy). If these rules are followed,
the client can sucessfully manage the working copy. If renames or
other rearrangements happen outside of Subversion, then the UI has
been violated and the working copy might be broken. The client cannot
guess what happened.
People sometimes run into this problem because they want to make
version control "transparent". They trick users into using a working
copy, then have a script run later that tries to guess what happened
and run appropriate client commands. Unfortunately, this technique
only goes a short distance. 'svn status' will show missing items and
unversioned items, which the script can then automatically 'svn rm' or
'svn add'. But if a move or copy has happened, you're out of luck.
Even if the script has a foolproof way of detecting these things, 'svn
mv' and 'svn cp' can't operate after the action has already
occurred.
In summary: a working copy is wholly under Subversion's control,
and Subversion wasn't designed to be transparent. If you're looking
for transparency, try setting up an apache server and using the
"SVNAutoversioning" feature described in appendix C of the book. This
will allow users to mount the repository as a network disk, and any
changes made to the volume cause automatic commits on the server.
How do I run svnserve as a service
on Windows?
For versions 1.4.0 and later, you can find
instructions
here
How do I convert my repository from using BDB
to FSFS or from FSFS to BDB?
There are three steps:
dump/load
from the old format to the new
one.
Copy the hook scripts.
Copy the configuration files.
Say you have a repository
/svn/myrepos
which is using the BDB
backend and you would like to switch to using the FSFS backend:
Close down your server so that the data cannot change during this
procedure.
Make a new repository specifying the fsfs backend (it is the default
from 1.2 onwards), e.g.,
svnadmin create /svn/myreposfsfs --fs-type
fsfs
Pipe the output of a dump from
/svn/myrepos
to the input of a
load into
/svn/myreposfsfs
, e.g.,
svnadmin dump /svn/myrepos
-q | svnadmin load /svn/myreposfsfs
. Windows users should dump
to a file and load from that file in two separate steps.
Copy any hook scripts which are active in
/svn/myrepos/hooks
into
/svn/myreposfsfs/hooks
. Don't mindlessly copy everything, the
templates generated by Subversion may have changed.
Compare the template scripts which the
svnadmin create
command
put in
/svn/myreposfsfs/hooks
with those in
/svn/myrepos/hooks
and incorporate any changes which you would like
into your active hook scripts.
Copy configuration files from
/svn/myrepos/conf
into
/svn/myreposfsfs/conf
(and don't forget a password
file, if you use one). Or you might instead want to merge
the
changes
that you made to your configuration files into
the new default ones.
Rename
/svn/myrepos
to
/svn/myreposbdb
and then
/svn/myreposfsfs
to
/svn/myrepos
ensuring that the
file permissions are the same as those that the BDB version had.
Restart the server.
Once you are happy that all is well with your new repository delete the old
one.
To do the reverse and migrate from FSFS to BDB change the
svnadmin
create
command to specify BDB.
How does Subversion handle binary files?
When you first add or import a file into Subversion, the file is
examined to determine if it is a binary file. Currently, Subversion
just looks at the first 1024 bytes of the file; if any of the bytes
are zero, or if more than 15% are not ASCII printing characters, then
Subversion calls the file binary.
If Subversion determines that the file is binary, the file receives
an svn:mime-type property set to "application/octet-stream". (You can
always override this by using the
auto-props feature
or by setting the property manually with
svn propset
.)
Subversion 1.7 and later can optionally be compiled with support for
libmagic
to detect
MIME types of binary files which are added to version control.
This feature is used only for binary files for which no MIME type
is found via auto-props or the mime-types-file configuration option.
If libmagic identifies a file as a text file, Subversion will treat
the file as a text file by default.
Subversion treats the following files as text:
Files with no svn:mime-type
Files with a svn:mime-type starting "text/"
Files with a svn:mime-type equal to "image/x-xbitmap"
Files with a svn:mime-type equal to "image/x-xpixmap"
All other files are treated as binary, meaning that Subversion will:
Not attempt to automatically merge received changes with local
changes during
svn update
or
svn merge
Not show the differences as part of
svn diff
Not show line-by-line attribution for
svn blame
In all other respects, Subversion treats binary files the same as
text files, e.g. if you set the svn:keywords or svn:eol-style
properties, Subversion will perform keyword substitution or newline
conversion on binary files.
Note that whether or not a file is binary does not affect the
amount of repository space used to store changes to that file, nor
does it affect the amount of traffic between client and server. For
storage and transmission purposes, Subversion uses a diffing method
that works equally well on binary and text files; this is completely
unrelated to the diffing method used by the 'svn diff'
command.
How can I make
svn diff
show me just the names of the
changed files, not their contents?
svn diff
doesn't have an option to do this, but
If you only are interested in the diffs between, say, revision 10
and the revision just before it,
svn log -vq -r10
does
exactly what you want;
otherwise, if you're using Unix, this works for any range of revisions:
svn log -vq -r123:456 | egrep '^ {3}[ADMR] ' | cut -c6- | sort | uniq
Version 1.4 of the
svn diff
command will have a "--summarize"
option.
How can I use wildcards or globbing to move many files at once?
You want to do something like
svn mv svn://server/trunk/stuff/* svn://server/trunk/some-other-dir
but it fails with
svn: Path 'svn://server/trunk/stuff/*' does not exist in revision 123
... or some other inscrutable error message.
Subversion doesn't expand wildcards like "*" in URL arguments.
(Technically speaking, Subversion does not expand wildcards in local
paths either, but on most operating systems the shell expands wildcards
in local paths in the command line before passing the resulting list to
Subversion.)
You have to generate the list of source URLs yourself. You could do it
like this (in Bash):
s=svn://server/trunk/stuff
items=$(svn ls "$s")
urls=$(for item in $items; do echo $s/$item; done)
svn mv $urls svn://server/trunk/some-other-dir -m "Moved all at once"
In Subversion v1.4 and earlier, Subversion did not allow you to "cp" and
"mv" multiple paths or URLs in one command. You have to issue multiple
commands.
If you happen to have a working copy that contains all the source
files as well as the destination directory, then you can exploit your
shell's wildcard feature to do the move, like this (for Bash):
for i in stuff/*; do svn mv $i some-other-dir; done
svn ci -m "moved all the stuff into some other dir"
In any case, you can always accumulate a list of the names of the
source files, and then run "svn mv" on each item in that list, like
this:
s=svn://server/trunk/stuff
svn ls "$s" | \
while read f
do svn mv "$s/$f" svn://server/trunk/some-other-dir -m "Moved just one file"
done
Note, however, that this will generate one commit per source file;
that's in contrast to the above method (using a working copy) which
generates just one commit total.
There is a program called "svnmucc" (previously "mucc"), whose source is
distributed with Subversion, that enables you to combine multiple
commands into one commit. For more information, see
$ svnmucc help
How can I maintain a modified version (a "vendor branch") of
third-party software using Subversion?
People frequently want to use Subversion to track their local
changes to third-party code, even across upgrades from the
third-party — that is, they want to maintain their own
divergent branch, while still incorporating new releases from the
upstream source. This is commonly called a
vendor branch
(the term long predates Subversion), and the techniques for
maintaining one in Subversion are
described here
If the vendor code is hosted in a remote Subversion repository,
then you can use
Piston
to
manage your copy of the vendor's code.
How do I make the contents of a previous revision become HEAD again?
Use 'svn merge' or 'svn copy', as
described in the Subversion book
Troubleshooting:
Every time I try to run a svn command, it says my
working copy is locked. Is my working copy corrupt?
Your working copy is not corrupt, nor is your data lost. Subversion's
working copy is a journaling system, meaning that it logs everything it
is about to do before it does so. If the svn client program is
interrupted violently (segfault or killed, not with Control-C), then
one or more lockfiles are left behind, along with logfiles describing
unfinished business. (The `svn status' command will show an 'L' next
to locked directories.) Any other process that attempts to access the
working copy will fail when it sees the locks. To awaken your working
copy, you need to tell the svn client to finish the work. Simply
run:
svn cleanup working-copy
I'm trying to commit, but Subversion says my
working copy is out of date?
Three kinds of situation that can cause this:
Debris from a failed commit is littering your working copy.
You may have had a commit that went sour between the time the
new revision was added in the server and the time your client
performed its post-commit admin tasks (including refreshing your
local text-base copy). This might happen for various reasons
including (rarely) problems in the database back end or (more
commonly) network dropouts at exactly the wrong time.
If this happens, it's possible that you have already committed
the very changes you are trying now to commit. You can use 'svn
log -rHEAD' to see if your supposed-failed commit actually
succeeded. If it did, run 'svn revert' to revert your local
changes, then run 'svn update' to get your own changes back from the
server. (Note that only 'svn update' brings your local copies
up-to-date; revert doesn't do that.)
Mixed revisions.
When Subversion commits, the client only bumps the revision
numbers of the nodes the commit touches, not all nodes in the
working copy. This means that in a single working copy, the
files and subdirectories might be at different revisions,
depending on when you last committed them. In certain operations
(for example, directory property modifications), if the
repository has a more recent version of the node, the commit will
be rejected, to prevent data loss. See
Mixed revisions have limitations
in the
Version Control with
Subversion
book for details.
You can fix the problem by running 'svn update' in the working
copy.
You might be genuinely out of date — that is,
you're trying to commit a change to a file that has been changed
by someone else since you last updated your copy of that file.
Again, 'svn update' is the way to fix this.
I've contributed a patch to a project and the patch added a new file.
Now
svn update
does not work.
In order to include your new file in the patch you likely ran the
svn add
command so that the
svn diff
command would include the new file in the patch.
If your patch is committed to the code base and you run an
svn update
, then
you might receive an error message of: "svn: Failed to add file 'my.new.file':
object of the same name already exists".
The reason that you received this error is that you still have your local copy of
the file in your working copy. The steps to correct this problem are:
Run the
svn revert
command to remove the scheduled add within
Subversion.
Delete the file or move it to a location outside your working copy.
Now you should be able to run the
svn update
command.
You might want to compare the new file from the repository with your original file.
I just built the distribution binary,
and when I try to check out Subversion, I get an error about an
"Unrecognized URL scheme." What's up with that?
Subversion uses a plugin system to allow access to repositories.
Currently there are three of these plugins: ra_local allows access to
a local repository, ra_neon or ra_serf which allow access to a repository via
WebDAV, and ra_svn allows local or remote access via the svnserve
server. When you attempt to perform an operation in Subversion, the
program tries to dynamically load a plugin based on the URL scheme. A
`file://' URL will try to load ra_local, and an `http://' URL will try
to load ra_neon or ra_serf.
The error you are seeing means that the dynamic linker/loader can't find
the plugins to load. For `http://' access, this normally means that you have
not linked Subversion to neon or serf when compiling it (check the configure
script output and the config.log file for information about this).
It also happens when you build Subversion with shared libraries,
then attempt to run it without first running 'make install'.
Another possible cause is that you ran make install, but the
libraries were installed in a location that the dynamic linker/loader
doesn't recognize. Under Linux, you can allow the linker/loader to find the
libraries by adding the library directory to /etc/ld.so.conf and running
ldconfig. If you don't wish to do this, or you don't have root access, you
can also specify the library directory in the LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment
variable.
I'm getting errors finding or opening a repository,
but I know my repository URL is correct. What's wrong?
See
this faq.
When I run `
configure
', I get errors about
subs-1.sed line 38: Unterminated `s' command
What's wrong?
You probably have old copies of
/usr/local/bin/apr-config
and
/usr/local/bin/apu-config
on your system. Remove them, make
sure the
apr/
and
apr-util/
that you're
building with are completely up-to-date, and try again.
I'm having trouble building Subversion
under Windows with MSVC++ 6.0. What should I do?
Probably you just need to get the latest platform SDK. The one that
ships with VC++ 6.0 is not recent enough.
How can I specify a Windows drive letter in
file:
URL?
Like this:
svn import file:///d:/some/path/to/repos/on/d/drive
See
Subversion Repository URLs
in the Subversion Book for more
details.
Microsoft Visual Studio 2002 and 2003 seem to have a problem with
the ".svn" directory name. What should I do?
Visual Studio can use a web subsystem for ASP.Net, which uses frontpage
server extensions to do remote publishing through IIS. This subsystem rejects
any pathname that starts with ".". This causes a problem when you try to
remotely publish a Subversion working copy, because of the ".svn"
subdirectories. The error message says something like "unable to
read project information".
To work around this, set the environment variable
SVN_ASP_DOT_NET_HACK to any value — this will tell
Windows clients to use "_svn" as a directory name in your working
copy. See
the relevant section of the Subversion 1.3 release notes
for more
details, and see
this question
for other ways to
customize the administrative directory name.
I'm having trouble doing write
operations to a Subversion repository over a network.
For example, one user reported that imports worked fine over local
access:
$ mkdir test
$ touch test/testfile
$ svn import test file:///var/svn/test -m "Initial import"
Adding test/testfile
Transmitting file data .
Committed revision 1.
But not from a remote host:
$ svn import http://svn.sabi.net/test testfile -m "import"
nicholas's password: xxxxxxx
svn_error: #21110 :
The specified activity does not exist.
We've seen this when the REPOS/dav/ directory is not writable by
the httpd process. Check the permissions to ensure Apache can write
to the
dav/
directory (and to
db/
, of course).
What is the best method of doing a network
trace of the conversation between a Subversion client and
server?
Please see
/docs/community-guide/debugging.html#net-trace
Why does the
svn revert
require an
explicit target? Why is it not recursive by default? These
behaviors differ from almost all the other subcommands.
The short answer: it's for your own good.
Subversion places a very high priority on protecting your data, and
not just your versioned data. Modifications that you make to
already-versioned files, and new files scheduled for addition to the
version control system, must be treated with care.
Making the
svn revert
command require an explicit
target—even if that target is just '.'—is one way of
accomplishing that. This requirement (as well as requiring you to
supply the
--recursive (-R)
flag if you want that behavior)
is intended to make you really think about what you're doing, because
once your files are reverted, your local modifications are gone
forever.
Why does SVN log say "(no author)" for files
committed or imported via Apache (ra_dav)?
If you allow anonymous write access to the repository via Apache,
the Apache server never challenges the SVN client for a username, and
instead permits the write operation without authentication. Since
Subversion has no idea who did the operation, this results in a log
like this:
$ svn log
------------------------------------------------------------------------
rev 24: (no author) | 2003-07-29 19:28:35 +0200 (Tue, 29 Jul 2003)
See
the Subversion book
to learn about configuring access restrictions in Apache.
I'm getting occasional "Access Denied"
errors on Windows. They seem to happen at random. Why?
These appear to be due to the various Windows services that monitor
the filesystem for changes (anti-virus software, indexing services, the
COM+ Event Notification Service). This is not really a bug in Subversion,
which makes it difficult for us to fix. A summary of the current state of
the investigation is available
here
A workaround that should reduce the incidence rate for most people was
implemented in revision 7598; if you have an earlier version, please
update to the latest release.
On FreeBSD, certain operations (especially
svnadmin create) sometimes hang. Why?
This is usually due to a lack of available entropy on the system.
You probably need to configure the system to gather entropy from
sources such as hard-disk and network interrupts. Consult your system
manpages, specifically random(4) and rndcontrol(8) on how to effect
this change.
I can see my repository in a web browser, but
'svn checkout' gives me an error about "301 Moved Permanently".
What's wrong?
It means your httpd.conf is misconfigured. Usually this error happens
when you've defined the Subversion virtual "location" to exist within
two different scopes at the same time.
For example, if you've exported a repository as
, but you've also set your
DocumentRoot
to
be
/www
, then you're in trouble. When the request comes in
for
/www/foo/bar
, apache doesn't know whether to find a
real
file named
/foo/bar
within your
DocumentRoot
, or whether to ask mod_dav_svn to fetch a file
/bar
from the
/www/foo
repository. Usually the
former case wins, and hence the "Moved Permanently" error.
The solution is to make sure your repository
does
not
overlap or live within any
areas already exported as normal web shares.
It's also possible that you have an object in the web root
which has the same name as your repository URL. For example,
imagine your web server's document root is
/var/www
and your Subversion repository is located at
/home/svn/repo
. You then configure Apache to serve
the repository at
. If you then
create the directory
/var/www/myrepo/
this will cause
a 301 error to occur.
Compiling with xlc on AIX, I get compilation
errors. What's wrong?
Adding
-qlanglvl=extended
to the
environment variable CFLAGS for configuration and build
will make xlc a bit more flexible and the code should
compile without error. See
and
its associated thread for more details.
I checked out a directory non-recursively
(with -N), and now I want to make certain subdirectories
"appear". But
svn up subdir
doesn't work.
See
issue
695
. The current implementation of
svn checkout -N
is
quite broken. It results in a working copy which has missing entries,
yet is ignorant of its "incompleteness". Apparently a whole bunch of
CVS users are fairly dependent on this paradigm, but none of the
Subversion developers were. For now, there's really no workaround
other than to change your process: try checking out separate
subdirectories of the repository and manually nesting your working
copies.
I am trying to use mod_dav_svn
with Apache on Win32 and I'm getting an error saying that the
module cannot be found, yet the mod_dav_svn.so file is right
there in
\Apache\modules.
The error message in this case is a little misleading. Most likely
Apache is unable to load one or more DLLs that
mod_dav_svn.so
relies on. If Apache is running as a service it will not have the
same
PATH
as a regular user. Make sure that
libdb4*.dll
intl3_svn.dll
libeay32.dll
and
ssleay32.dll
are present in either
\Apache\bin
or
\Apache\modules
. You can copy them from your Subversion
installation directory if they are not there.
If this still does not resolve the problem, you should use a tool
like
Dependency Walker
on
mod_dav_svn.so
to see if there are any other unresolved
dependencies.
Why aren't my repository hooks working?
They're supposed to invoke external programs, but the invocations
never seem to happen.
Before Subversion calls a hook script, it removes
all
variables -- including $PATH on Unix, and %PATH% on Windows
-- from the environment. Therefore, your script can only
run another program if you
spell out that program's absolute name.
Make sure the hook script is named correctly: for example, the post-commit
hook should be named
post-commit
(without extension) on Unix, and
post-commit.bat
or
post-commit.exe
on Windows.
Debugging tips:
If you're using Linux or Unix, try running the script "by hand", by
following these steps:
Use "su", "sudo", or something similar, to become the user who
normally would run the script. This might be
httpd
or
www-data
, for example, if you're using Apache;
it might be a user like
svn
if you're running
svnserve and a special Subversion user exists. This
will make clear any permissions problems that the script
might have.
Invoke the script with an empty environment by using the
"env" program. Here's an
example for the post-commit hook:
$ env - ./post-commit /var/lib/svn-repos 1234
Note the first argument to "env" is a dash; that's what
ensures the environment is empty.
Check your console for errors.
Why does my --diff-cmd complain about '-u'?
I tried to override it with --extensions, but it's not working.
When using an external diff command, Subversion builds a fairly
complicated command line. First is the specified --diff-cmd. Next comes
the specified --extensions (although empty --extensions are ignored), or
'-u' if --extensions is unspecified (or specified as ''). Third and
fourth, Subversion passes a '-L' and the first file's label (e.g.
"project_issues.html (revision 11209)"). Fifth and sixth are another
'-L' and the second label. Seventh and eighth are the first and second
file names (e.g. ".svn/text-base/project_issues.html.svn-base" and
".svn/tmp/project_issues.html.tmp").
If your preferred diff command does not support these arguments, you
may need to create a small wrapper script to discard arguments and just
use the last couple file paths.
Warning: Beware that Subversion does not expect the external diff
program to change the files it receives, and doing so may scramble the
working copy.
For further information, see issue
#2044
How does Subversion cache credentials (plaintext and encrypted)?
To avoid having to type a password for each server operation, Subversion
can cache credentials.
Passwords may have been cached unencrypted by older versions of Subversion
("grandfathered in") and Subversion always supports reading these. Whether and
how Subversion caches new credentials depends on several factors, including the
access method, operating system, compile-time options, and settings in the
client's run-time config file.
To show the credentials in your cache, use
svn auth
. Credentials
are never removed automatically but may be removed manually using
svn auth --remove
Windows
On Windows, Subversion uses standard Windows APIs to encrypt the data, so
only the user can decrypt the cached password.
(Since Subversion
1.2.)
macOS (formerly Mac OS X)
On macOS, Subversion uses the system Keychain facility to encrypt/store
the user's svn password.
(Since Subversion 1.4.)
UNIX/Linux
On UNIX/Linux, Subversion supports up to four credential caches:
GNOME Keyring
KWallet
GPG-Agent
Plaintext cache in ~/.subversion/auth/svn.simple/
To determine which credential caches your Subversion client supports, run
the
svn --version
command and look for "The following authentication
credential caches are available" toward the end of its output.
GNOME Keyring and KWallet both facilitate storing passwords on disk
encrypted. For Subversion to support these programs (since Subversion 1.6),
they need to be available at compile-time and at run-time.
TODO: Discuss GPG-Agent.
Depending on a compile-time option (--enable-plaintext-password-storage)
and runtime configurations (see below) Subversion
may
fallback to storing
passwords in the Plaintext cache.
The default value of --enable-plaintext-password-storage was changed from
True to False in Subversion 1.12, thus disabling the Plaintext cache unless
explicitly enabled.
The directory which contains cached Plaintext passwords (usually
~/.subversion/auth/
) has permissions of 700, meaning only the user
(and root) can read them.
"Subversion was compiled with support for Plaintext password cache but I
want to prevent writing passwords to the Plaintext cache."
The following options are available in your run-time config file
(per user ~/.subversion/config and ~/.subversion/servers,
systemwide /etc/subversion/config and /etc/subversion/servers):
To allow encrypted stores like GNOME Keyring and KWallet, but not the
Plaintext cache, set
store-plaintext-passwords = no
To allow caching server certs but not passwords (encrypted or not), set
store-passwords = no
To disable storing any kind of credentials (encrypted or not) set
store-auth-creds = no
"I want to use the Plaintext cache but it wasn't enabled at compile
time."
In response to various questions and requests, the Subversion developers
have written a Python script that can store a plain-text password to the
cache. If you understand the security implications, have ruled out other
alternatives, and still want to cache your password in plain-text on disk, you
may find the script
in the
tools/client-side/
directory in (as of this writing) our trunk
Additional Information
More information on password caching is in Chapter 6 of the
Subversion book
under
"Client Credentials Caching".
I can't hotbackup my repository,
svnadmin fails on files larger than 2Gb!
Early versions of APR on its 0.9 branch, which Apache 2.0.x and
Subversion 1.x use, have no support for copying large files (2Gb+).
A fix which solves the 'svnadmin hotcopy' problem has been applied and
is included in APR 0.9.5+ and Apache 2.0.50+. The fix doesn't work
on all platforms, but works on Linux.
I cannot see the log entry for the file
I just committed. Why?
Assume you run '
svn checkout
' on a repository and
receive a working copy at revision 7 (aka, r7) with one file in it
called
foo.c
. You spend some time modifying the file and
then commit it successfully. Two things happen:
The repository moves to a new HEAD revision on the server.
The number of the new HEAD revision depends on how many other commits
were made since your working copy was checked out. For example, the
new HEAD revision might be r20.
In your working copy, only the file
foo.c
moves to r20.
The rest of your working copy remains at r7.
You now have what is known as a
mixed revision working copy
One file is at r20, but all other files remain at r7 until they too are
committed, or until '
svn update
' is run.
$ svn -v status
7 7 nesscg .
20 20 nesscg foo.c
If you run the '
svn log
' command without any
arguments, it prints the log information for the current directory
(named '
' in the above listing). Since the directory itself
is still at r7, you do not see the log information for r20.
To see the latest logs, do one of the following:
Run '
svn log -rHEAD
'.
Run '
svn log URL
', where URL is the repository URL.
If the current directory is a working copy you can abbreviate the URL
to the repository root as
^/
to save some typing. Note that on
Windows the "^" symbol is special and must be quoted. E.g.:
svn log "^/" --limit 10
Run '
svn log URL
', where URL is the URL of the
subdirectory you want to see the log for, for example:
svn log ^/trunk
Ask for just that file's log information, by running
svn log foo.c
'.
Update your working copy so it's all at r20, then run
svn log
'.
Why do I get occasional, seemingly inconsistent errors when checking
out over http:// from a repository running on MacOS X 10.4 (Tiger)?
Note: this assumes the repository is being served by Apache 2.0.x.
There is
a bug in APR 0.9.6
that is present when it is running on Tiger,
and shows up when you attempt to check out a file larger than 64Kb.
The resulting checkout fails, often with unpredictable error messages.
Here are some examples of what you might see on the client side, the
specific errors may differ for you:
svn: Invalid diff stream: [tgt] insn 1 starts beyond the target view position
svn: Unexpected end of svndiff input
svn: REPORT request failed on '/path/to/repository'
svn: REPORT of '/path/to/repository/!svn/vcc/default': Chunk delimiter was invalid
There may also be errors in the Apache error_log, such as:
[error] Provider encountered an error while streaming a REPORT response. [500, #0]
[error] A failure occurred while driving the update report editor [500, #190004]
To confirm the presence of this bug — assuming
you have access to the machine that the repository is being served
from — try checking out using a file:// URL, which
will access the filesystem directly instead of going through Apache.
If the resulting checkout completes successfully, then it is almost
certain that this is the problem.
Currently, the best solution is to upgrade to APR 1.2.0+.
Alternately, you can rebuild Apache and Subversion from their
respective sources, setting the following environment variable before
running configure for Apache:
setenv ac_cv_func_poll no
or in Bourne shell syntax, like this:
ac_cv_func_poll=no; export ac_cv_func_poll
If you built APR / APRUTIL separately (i.e., you did not use the
ones that come as part of the Apache tarball), you must set that
environment variable before running configure for APR, as this is
where the problem lies.
I can't build Subversion from working copy
source on Debian GNU/Linux; I get errors at the final link
stage. What's wrong?
If you see errors like this in the final link stage of a Subversion
trunk source build:
/usr/local/apache2/lib/libaprutil-0.so.0: undefined reference to `db_create'
/usr/local/apache2/lib/libaprutil-0.so.0: undefined reference to `db_strerror'
it might be because you're on a Debian GNU/Linux system and need to
upgrade 'libtool'. (I've also heard that the Debian packagers had to
tweak 'libtool' and that this may cause some problems for Subversion
builds. But that's hearsay — I didn't have time to
verify the details before writing this FAQ entry. However, see
and the thread it
spawned for a detailed discussion.)
In any case, after encountering this problem on a Debian GNU/Linux
system running a newly-dist-upgraded 'testing' distribution on 15 Nov
2005, the solution was to build
libtool 1.5.20
from source, using the standard "./configure && make &&
sudo make install" recipe. After that, I did a 'make clean' in
my Subversion working copy tree, './autogen.sh', './configure', 'make',
and everything worked fine.
Note that another report of these symptoms appeared at
, though the
solution described here was not mentioned in that thread.
I've started svnserve, but it doesn't seem to be listening on
port 3690.
Invoke
svnserve
with the
--listen-host=0.0.0.0
option.
Svnserve does not properly support IPv4/IPv6 dual-stack operation.
See
issue #2382
I can't add a directory
because Subversion says it's "already under version control".
The directory you're trying to add already contains a
.svn
subdirectory — it is a working
copy — but it's from a different repository location
than the directory to which you're trying to add it. This probably
happened because you used your operating system's "copy" command
(instead of
svn copy
) to copy a subdirectory in this working
copy, or to copy some other working copy into this one.
The quick and dirty solution is to delete all
.svn
directories contained in the directory you're trying to add; this
will let the "add" command complete. If you're using Unix, this
command will delete
.svn
directories under
dir
find dir -type d -name .svn -exec rm -rf {} \;
However, if the copy was from the same repository, you should
ideally delete or move aside the copy, and use
svn copy
to
make a proper copy, which will know its history and save space in the
repository.
If it was from a different repository, you should ask yourself
why
you made this copy; and you should ensure that by
adding this directory, you won't be making an unwanted copy of it in
your repository.
Accessing non-public repositories
via svnserve is really slow sometimes.
This often happens when APR is compiled to use
/dev/random
and the server is unable to gather enough entropy. If Subversion is the
only application using APR on the server, you can safely recompile APR
with the
--with-devrandom=/dev/urandom
option passed to
configure
. This should
not
be done on systems that use
APR for other processes, however, as it could make other services
insecure.
When performing Subversion operations involving a lot of data over
SSL, I get the error
SSL negotiation failed: SSL error:
decryption failed or bad record mac
This can occur due to a problem with OpenSSL 0.9.8. Downgrading to
an older version (or possibly upgrading to a newer version) is known
to fix this issue.
I get an error that says "This client is too old".
You're using both an older (pre-1.4) version of the Subversion
command-line client, and Subclipse. You recently upgraded Subclipse,
and now your command-line client says
svn: This client is too old to work with working copy
'/path/to/your/working/copy'; please get a newer Subversion client
This happened because Subversion's working-copy format changed
incompatibly—the new version of Subclipse upgraded your working
copy, so now your command-line program, which is old, cannot read it.
(This problem isn't specific to Subclipse; it would also have happened
if you'd used a command-line client that was 1.4 or newer, along with
your older command-line client.)
The fix is simply to upgrade your command-line client to 1.4 or newer.
As of Subversion 1.5, a helper script is provided to downgrade working
copies to formats compatible with earlier releases of Subversion; see
this faq.
Why doesn't
svn switch
work in some cases?
In some cases where there are unversioned (and maybe ignored) items
in the working copy,
svn switch
can get an error. The switch
stops, leaving the working copy half-switched.
Unfortunately, if you take the wrong corrective action you can end
up with an unusable working copy. Sometimes with these situations,
the user is directed to do
svn cleanup
. But the
svn
cleanup
may also encounter an error. See
issue
#2505
The user can manually remove the directories or files causing
the problem, and then run
svn cleanup
, and continue the switch, to
recover from this situation.
Note that a switch from a
pristine
clean checkout always
works without error. There are three ways of working if you are using
svn switch
as part of your development process:
Fully clean your working copy of unversioned (including ignored)
files before switching.
WARNING! This deletes all unversioned
dirs/files. Be VERY sure that you do not need anything that will be
removed.
# Check and delete svn unversioned files:
svn status --no-ignore | grep '^[I?]' | sed 's/^[I?]//'
svn status --no-ignore | grep '^[I?]' | sed 's/^[I?]//' | xargs rm -rf
Keep a
pristine
clean checkout. Update that, then copy it,
and switch the copy when a switch to another branch is desired.
Live dangerously :).
Switch between branches without cleaning up BUT if you encounter a switch error
know that you have to recover from this properly.
Delete the unversioned files and the directory that the error was reported on.
Then "svn cleanup" if needed and then resume the switch.
Unless you delete
all
unversioned files, you may have to repeat this
process multiple times.
Some examples are detailed
here in issue 2505
The problem is that the svn client plays it
safe and doesn't want to delete anything unversioned.
Two specific examples are detailed here to illustrate a problem like this.
There are also other svn switch errors, not covered here, which you
can avoid by switching only from a
pristine
checkout.
If any directory has been moved or renamed between the branches, then
anything unversioned will cause a problem.
In this case, you'll see this error:
wc/$ svn switch $SVNROOT/$project/branches/$ticket-xxx
svn: Won't delete locally modified directory '
svn: Left locally modified or unversioned files
Removing all unversioned files, and continuing the switch will recover from this.
If a temporary build file has ever been added and removed, then a switch
in a repository with that unversioned file (likely after a build) fails.
You'll see the same error:
wc/$ svn switch $SVNROOT/$project/branches/$ticket-xxx
svn: Won't delete locally modified directory '
svn: Left locally modified or unversioned files
In this case, just removing the unversioned items will not recover.
A cleanup fails, but "svn switch" directs you to run "svn cleanup".
wc/$ svn switch $SVNROOT/$project/branches/$ticket-xxx
svn: Directory '
wc/$ svn cleanup
svn: '
wc/$ svn switch $SVNROOT/$project/branches/$ticket-xxx
svn: Working copy '.' locked
svn: run 'svn cleanup' to remove locks (type 'svn help cleanup' for details)
Removing the directory (and all other unversioned files, to prevent
"switch" from breaking on a similar error repeatedly), and continuing the switch
will recover from this.
The TortoiseSVN cleanup error is a bit different. You might encounter this:
Subversion reported an error while doing a cleanup!
In each case here, the "svn switch" breaks leaving you with a half-switched
working copy. "svn status" will show items with S for switched items (different
from top directory), ! for directories with problems, and ~ for the files that are
the problem (and with maybe L for locked). Like this:
wc/$ svn status
! .
!
S
~
In Windows, when doing an update with the command-line client, I
get an error saying "The system cannot find the path specified"
and suggesting that my working copy might be corrupt. But I can
update with TortoiseSVN just fine. What's going on?
A careful examination of the Windows API documentation regarding
Naming a File
reveals the most common reason why this happens. In
short, you can address significantly longer path names when using the
Unicode versions of the Windows path functions, and providing absolute
path specifiers instead of relative path specifiers. Fortunately, the
Apache Portable Runtime (APR) library that Subversion uses
transparently converts absolute paths (like
C:\WorkingCopy\file.txt
) into the form required by the
Windows APIs (
\\?\C:\WorkingCopy\file.txt
), and back again.
Unfortunately
, you only get these long-path benefits when
using absolute paths.
To see if path length is the reason for the problem you're seeing,
try providing an absolute target path to the Subversion command-line
client instead of a relative one (or none at all). In other words,
instead of doing this:
C:\> svn up WorkingCopy
or this:
C:\> cd C:\WorkingCopy
C:\WorkingCopy> svn up
do this:
C:\> svn update C:\WorkingCopy
If the problem goes away, congratulations — you've hit a
Windows path length limitation. And now you know the workaround.
Why does this problem not affect TortoiseSVN?
Because TortoiseSVN
always
provides absolute paths to the
Subversion APIs.
Why, then, does the Subversion command-line client not
always convert its input into absolute paths and use those?
It does, as of Subversion 1.7.
I got an error saying "This client is too old to work with working
copy '...' ". How can I fix it without upgrading Subversion?
Sometimes the working copy metadata format changes incompatibly
between minor releases. For example, say you have a working copy
created with Subversion 1.4.4, but one day you decide to try out
Subversion 1.5.0. Afterwards, you attempt to switch back to 1.4.4,
but it doesn't work — it just gives the above
error.
This is because 1.5.0 upgraded your working copy format to support
some new features (in this case, changelists, the keep-local flag, and
variable-depth directories). Although 1.4.4 doesn't know anything
about these new features, it can at least recognize that the working
copy format has been upgraded to something higher than it can
handle.
1.5.0 upgraded the working copy for a good reason: it realizes that
1.4.4 does not know about these new features, and that if 1.4.4 were
to meddle with the working copy metadata now, important information
might be lost, possibly causing corruption (see
issue
#2961
, for example).
Subversion 1.7.0 and newer will not upgrade working copies unless
you explicitly ask them to do so. (Upgrading the working copies is, however,
required; Subversion 1.7.0 cannot operate on working copies created or used
by earlier Subversions.)
Subversion 1.6.x and earlier automatically upgrade working copies when
they first touch them. This behavior can be annoying, if you just
want to try out a new release of Subversion without installing it
permanently. For this reason, we distribute a script that can
downgrade working copies when doing so is safe:
Run that script with the "
--help
" option to see how to use
it. (It can downgrade 1.6.x working copies to formats usable by Subversion
1.4.x and 1.5.x, but cannot downgrade 1.7.x working copies.)
As future versions of Subversion are released, we will try to
keep this FAQ entry up-to-date with potential downgrade scenarios and
their implications.
I got an error saying "relocation R_X86_64_32 against `a local symbol'
can not be used when making a shared object" when building the Neon
library on 64-bit Linux.
The Neon library, used for communication between a Subversion server and
client over HTTP, is usually built as a static library. But it is
subsequently linked into a different shared library. This causes an error
during the build process on 64-bit AMD systems similar to this:
subversion-1.4.6/neon/src/.libs/libneon.a(ne_request.o): relocation R_X86_64_32
against `a local symbol' can not be used when making a shared object;
recompile with -fPIC
/home/jrandom/subversion/subversion-1.4.6/neon/src/.libs/libneon.a: could not
read symbols: Bad value
There was a
thread
on the
developers' list about this.
The solution is to supply the "--enable-shared" option to Subversion's
configure script.
Why am I getting an error saying "Could not read response body:
Secure connection truncated" when doing a checkout from
Apache?
In short, this error is representative of a class of problems which
can occur when Apache erroneously believes that your Subversion client
is no longer tending to the network connection it has made with
Apache. Other error messages have been reported in similar
circumstances, depending on whether or not SSL was in use for the
connection, or when exactly Apache decided that the connection should
be terminated.
The Subversion client tries to keep working copies in a sane state
at all times. One way it does this during checkouts is by squirreling
away the pristine versions of checked-out files until all the files
and subdirectories for a given directory have been fetched. Once all
the data for a directory has been downloaded, the client "finalizes"
that directory, copying the pristine versions of files out into the
working area, diddling administrative data, and so on. While this
directory finalization is happening, the client is focused on that
task and is
not
tending to the checkout network stream.
Sometimes — typically in situations where a versioned directory
contains an abnormally large number of files, or a bunch of abnormally
large files — the client can spend so much time finalizing a
directory (and ignoring the network stream) that Apache thinks the
client has gone away for good, so Apache terminates the connection.
When the client finally turns its attention back to the network
stream, it finds that the server has given up on the connection, and
it reports this as an error.
One workaround for this situation is to increase the amount of time
Apache is willing to wait for a client to prove it is still listening
to the network stream. You do this by adjusting upward the
Apache
Timeout
configuration value. You are encouraged,
however, to evaluate your data set. If having a huge number of files
in a single directory is causing problems for you during checkouts,
there is some chance that it will cause additional problems elsewhere,
too. If it is possible for you to split your collection of files up
into a few subdirectories with smaller file counts, this could prove
universally beneficial.
Why am I getting a tree conflict upon update even though no one else
has committed conflicting changes?
When you commit, only the files/directories that are actually changed by
the commit get their base revisions bumped to HEAD in the working copy.
The other files/directories (possibly including the directory you committed
from!) don't get their base revisions bumped, which means Subversion still
considers them to be based on outdated revisions.
See also
this question
and
this
section of the Subversion book
This can be confusing, in particular because of tree conflicts
you can inflict upon yourself.
E.g. if you add a file to a directory and commit, and then locally move
that directory somewhere else, and then try to commit, this second commit
will fail with an out-of-date error since the directory itself is still
based on an out-of-date revision.
When updating, a tree conflict will be flagged.
Subversion has currently no way of knowing that you yourself just committed
the change which caused the directory to be out-of-date during the second
commit. And allowing an out-of-date directory to be committed may cause
certain tree conflicts not to be detected, so Subversion can't allow you
to do this.
To avoid this problem, make sure to update your entire working copy
before making structural changes such as deleting, adding, or moving files
or directories.
When performing Subversion operations
over SSL, I get the error
SSL handshake failed: SSL error code
-1/1/336032856
This can happen when the hostname reported by the server does not the
match hostname given in the SSL certificate. Make sure your server configuration
uses correct values for
ServerName
and
NameVirtualHost
A client-side fix is to update OpenSSL to version 1.0.0d.
See
this post to the Subversion developer mailing list
for details.
I get
"Error validating server
certificate"
error even though I configure the SSL certificates
correctly in the server.
This error occurs if the
certificate issuer is not recognized as 'Trusted'
by the SVN client. Subversion will ask you whether you trust the certificate and if you want to store this certificate.
$ svn info https://mysite.com/svn/repo
Error validating server certificate for 'https://mysite.com:443':
- The certificate is not issued by a trusted authority. Use the
fingerprint to validate the certificate manually!
Certificate information:
- Hostname: mysite.com
- Valid: from Wed, 18 Jan 2012 00:00:00 GMT until Fri, 18 Jan 2013
23:59:59 GMT
- Issuer: Google Inc, US
- Fingerprint:
34:4b:90:e7:e3:36:81:0d:53:1f:10:c0:4c:98:66:90:4a:9e:05:c9
(R)eject, accept (t)emporarily or accept (p)ermanently?
In some cases, even if you accept this by entering 'p' option, the
next time you access SVN, the same error appears again. There can
be multiple reasons. The problem may be your ~/.subversion directory has
wrong permissions, so that each time you want to permanently add the
credentials, svn actually cannot do so, and also doesn't inform you
that it can't.
This can be solved by either fixing the permissions with chmod 644 in
~/.subversion/auth/svn.ssl.server
directory or by deleting the directory contents.
If deleted, the directory gets populated automatically the next time you
access the repository.
After importing files to my repository,
I don't see them in the repository directory. Where are they?
The files are in the repository; you can verify this by running commands
such as
svn ls -R
, or by trying to checkout a working copy from the
repository:
$ pwd
/var/srv/repositories/foo
$ ls -1
conf
db
format
hooks
locks
README.txt
$ svnlook youngest /var/srv/repositories/foo
$ svn ls file:///var/srv/repositories/foo
trunk/
tags/
branches/
The versioned files and directories are simply not stored on-disk in a
tree format (like CVS repositories used to), but instead are stored in
database files. The BDB backend uses Berkeley DB databases, and the FSFS
backend uses both a custom file format and may in the future use SQLite
databases.
When does
svn copy
create
svn:mergeinfo
properties?
In general, to avoid some kinds of spurious merge conflicts,
the following rules can be kept in mind:
When copying/renaming a file or directory
within
the trunk
or a branch, perform the copy/rename in a working copy. For renames,
the working copy should
not
be a
mixed-revision working copy
When copying/renaming an entire branch, perform the copy/rename in
the repository (i.e. via URLs).
During copies where the source is a URL, and the target is either a URL
or in a working copy, explicit mergeinfo is created on the copy target.
This is done so that when a branch is created with
svn copy ^/trunk ^/branches/mybranch
and later an ancestrally unrelated subtree is copied into the branch using
an invocation such as
svn copy ^/branches/another-branch/foo ^/branches/mybranch/bar
the directory
/branches/mybranch/bar
does not inherit mergeinfo
from its parent
/branches/mybranch
. Mergeinfo inherited from the
parent might not reflect the factually correct merge history of the new
child.
During copies where both the source and the target are within a working
copy, no mergeinfo is created on the copy target (as of Subversion 1.5.5).
This assumes the case where a new child is added on the trunk (or a branch),
and this addition is merged to another branch which is kept in sync using
periodic catch-up merges. In this case, the inherited mergeinfo of the
branch's new child is correct, and the creation of explicit mergeinfo could
cause spurious merge conflicts due to apparent, but factually inaccurate,
differences in the child's and parent's merge histories.
For additional details and discussion about this behaviour, see
this post on the users mailing list
Passwords which contain some special characters do not seem to be working?
Passwords which contain non-ASCII characters may not work reliably
with the basic authentication mechanisms Subversion supports. This is
due to potential character encoding differences between the client and
server systems. See
this mailing list post
for details.
As a workaround, you can configure your Subversion server to use a
single-sign-on mechanism, such as Kerberos or SSPI.
See the
Apache HTTPD server documentation
for details.
If you are using svnserve, see the
'Using svnserve with SASL' chapter
in the Subversion book.
When
using svnserve with SSH authentication
SSH keys can be used to
work around this limitation of passwords.
Why does an HTTP(S) URL-to-URL copy or branch/tag operation
take a long time?
If you are seeing slow server-side copying (a.k.a. branching or tagging)
with a Subversion repository served over HTTP(S), you might be running into
issue 4531
. This problem is caused by a crawl of
the “tree-to-copy” by
httpd's mod_dav module on the server (giving the copy a performance cost of
O(sizeof(tree)) instead of SVN's usual O(1) for branching/tagging).
This behaviour is present in
Apache httpd version 2.2.25 (or higher)
and
2.4.6 (or higher)
– older versions of httpd are not affected.
Branching/tagging a large tree may take several minutes because of this.
This problem has been fixed in mod_dav_svn in Subversion 1.8.14.
You can also use the following workaround to make
mod_dav skip the unnecessary work; add the following directives to the Apache
configuration on the server, preferably only inside the Location blocks
configured for SVN:
SetEnvIf Request_Method COPY method_is_copy
RequestHeader set Depth 0 env=method_is_copy
This adds a request header "Depth" with value 0 to each COPY request. This
makes mod_dav avoid the crawl of the tree being copied (yet still lets
Subversion perform a normal recursive copy).
See
this mailing list thread
for more details.
When performing Subversion operations
over SSL, I get the error
An error occurred during SSL communication
SSL communication errors can have various reasons.
You can use the openssl binary to debug the ssl connection.
openssl s_client -connect example.com:443 -servername example.com
If you use a client certificate,
then you need to convert Subversion's client certificate from pkcs12 to pem first:
openssl pkcs12 -in path/to/svn/cert.p12 -out cert.pem
Then you can use:
openssl s_client -connect example.com:443 -servername example.com -cert cert.pem
If you are using ssl-authority-files in
.subversion/servers
to verify
the server cert you can get
s_client
to do the same with the additional
parameter:
openssl s_client ... -CAfile path/to/authority.pem
The
s_client
output may indicate what problem is occurring.
For example, if
s_client
reports
error setting certificate
140258270184704:error:140AB18E:SSL routines:SSL_CTX_use_certificate:ca md too weak:../ssl/ssl_rsa.c:303:
then creating new CA keys with sha256 instead of md5 should solve the problem.
Developer questions:
How do I run the regression tests in a RAM disk?
See
How do I run a debugger on dynamic Subversion binaries without
having to install them?
Before the
make install
step on unix-y systems,
dynamically built "executables" in a Subversion source tree are
actually libtool-generated shell scripts which re-link and run the
real binary. As shown below, this complicates debugging:
subversion$ gdb subversion/svn/svn
... "/path/to/subversion/subversion/svn/svn": not in
executable format: File format not recognized
You can work around this by running gdb via the libtool command.
The libtool command in execute mode will detect that the svn command is a
libtool wrapper script and handle setting the appropriate environment
variables and replace the script with the path to the real file before
running gdb..
Your command line would look something like this:
$ libtool execute gdb subversion/svn/svn
How do I run a debugger on Subversion binaries without compiler
inlining obfuscating the source?
By default, gcc will often optimize away private variables and
functions, inlining the associated operations. This can complicate
stepping through the code in a debugger.
Work around this by turning off optimization during the
make
step on unix-y systems:
subversion$ make EXTRA_CFLAGS=-O0
(That's "dash ohh zero".) Alternately, you can make this change
more permanent by running
configure
as follows:
subversion$ ./configure --enable-debug
For a production install, remember to undo this operation before
installing Subversion from source, by re-running
make
or
configure
without the extra flag.
References:
What are all the HTTP methods Subversion
uses?
The Subversion client speaks a subset the WebDAV/DeltaV protocol to
the mod_dav_svn server module. The short answer is:
OPTIONS, PROPFIND, GET, REPORT,
MKACTIVITY, PROPPATCH, PUT, CHECKOUT, MKCOL,
MOVE, COPY, DELETE, LOCK, UNLOCK, MERGE
Note that this list may grow over time: Subversion 1.7+ started using the
POST
method when speaking to 1.7+ servers, and it's possible
that Subversion 1.9+ might start using yet another method when talking
to 1.9+ servers.
The details of the protocol are documented here:
What's a 'bikeshed'?
See Poul-Henning Kamp's post to freebsd-hackers:
How do you pronounce "Subversion"?
Jim Blandy, who gave Subversion both its name and repository
design, pronounces "Subversion"
"Subversion"
What's a 'baton'?
Throughout Subversion's source code there are many references to
'baton' objects. These are just
void *
data structures that
provide context to a function. In other APIs, they're often called
void *ctx
or
void *userdata
Subversion
developers call the structures "batons" because they're passed around
quite a bit.
What do you mean when you say that
repository is 'wedged'?
wedged repository:
A Subversion repository consists of two different internal parts, a
working compartment and a storage compartment. A wedged repository is
a repository where the working compartment is unaccessible for some
reason, but the storage compartment is intact. Therefore, a wedged
repository has not suffered any loss of data, but the working
compartment has to be corrected before you can access the
repository. See
this
entry for details
how to do that.
corrupted repository:
A corrupted Subversion repository is a repository where the storage
compartment has been damaged, and therefore there is some degree of
real data loss in the repository.
You might also like to check The Jargon File's definition for
'wedged'
What is CVSSv3 and what do the score and vector mean?
Subversion is using CVSSv3 in our
security advisories
so you will see a CVSSv3 Base Score and Vector in the Severity section of our
advisories. CVSSv3 is the current version of the Common Vulnerability Scoring
System which is an open industry standard for assessing the severity of
computer system security vulnerabilities.
FIRST
maintains the
documentation
for the standard.
The score is a number in the range of 0 to 10 with less risky vulnerabilities
scoring lower and more risky vunerabilities scoring higher. The score is
calculated by determining the metrics of the vunerability and then calculating
the score based on those metrics. If you want to understand how a score was
determined you would need the vector and an understanding of the
formula as specified by the standard
The vector is an
abbreviated description
of the metrics that apply to the vulnerability.
CVSSv3 provides for 3 types of metrics and scores; base, temporal and
environmental. The Subversion project will only ever provide the base
score and metrics. As a project we cannot determine the environmental
risks of the various installations so it is not possible for us to
calculate the environmental metrics. The temporal metrics are for factors
that may change over time. We do not update our advisories once published
so it's not possible for us to track these changing values.
Some vulnerabilities require specific configurations or environmental
factors in order to be exploited. CVSSv3 specifies that the Access Complexity
metric consider how common such a configuration is. As a result, a
vulnerability that requires an unusual configuration will have a low score.
The scores can help you prioritize how quickly you need to react to an advisory
but as a result of the Access Complexity metric you should still consider how
the vulnerability impacts your installation.
When calculating the Availability Impact metric of server vulnerabilities
the Subversion project will use the value of Complete within the context of
Subversion and not the host system. For example when considering a Denial of
Service attack the Availability Impact metric will be calculated as High if the
vulnerability allows an attacker to make the Subversion server completely
inaccessible. On the other hand if the attack only made the Subversion server
slow or limited the number of successful connections it would be rated as Low.
When calculating the Integrity Impact metric of server vulnerabilities the
Subversion project will use the value of High when history of the Subversion
repositories may be changed or when the ability to modify any file on the host
system occurs. The ability to change any file (while leaving the appropriate
history trail) in violation of any authentication or authorization requirements
will be treated as Low.
When calculating the Confidentiality Impact metric of server vulnerabilities
the Subversion project will use the value of High when all files in the
repository may be read regardless of any authentiation or authorizaiton
requirements. If only some files may be read it will be considered Low.
As a result of how we calculate these impact metrics you may see advisories
in vulnerability databases or vendor advisories that have a different score.
For instance an Linux distribution that provides a binary package of Subversion
may score the full exposure of the contents of the Subversion repository
hosted on the system as only a Low Confidentiality Impact, resulting in a lower
score.
Deprecated FAQ
Table of Contents
Troubleshooting:
Why doesn't HTTP Digest auth work?
Under Windows XP, the Subversion
server sometimes seems to send out corrupted data. Can this really be
happening?
BDB questions:
How do I determine which version of
Berkeley DB a repository is using?
Why is my repository taking up so much disk space?
My repository seems to get stuck all the
time, giving me errors about needing recovery (DB_RUNRECOVERY).
What could be the cause?
Every time I try to access
my repository, the process just hangs. Is my repository
corrupt?
My repository keeps giving
errors saying "Cannot allocate memory". What should I do?
When I start Apache, mod_dav_svn complains about
a "bad database version", that it found db-3.X, rather than
db-4.X.
I'm getting "Function not implemented" errors on
Red Hat 9, and nothing works. How do I fix this?
I'm getting the error "svn: bdb: call
implies an access method which is inconsistent with previous
calls". How do I fix this?
After upgrading to Berkeley DB
4.3 or later, I'm seeing repository errors.
Why do read-only operations still need repository write access?
Troubleshooting (deprecated):
Why doesn't HTTP Digest auth work?
This is probably due to a known bug in Apache HTTP Server (versions
2.0.48 and earlier), for which a patch is available, see
. You may also
want to read over
to see if the description there matches your symptoms.
Under Windows XP, the Subversion server
sometimes seems to send out corrupted data. Can this really
be happening?
You need to install Window XP Service Pack 1.
BDB questions:
How do I determine which version of
Berkeley DB a repository is using?
If it's a live repository, then the easy answer is "Whatever
version of Berkeley DB you have installed". If, however, it is a
repository from a backup, or some unknown source, and you have no idea
which version of Berkeley DB it was made with, here's how you find
out:
Run some command to view the two 4-byte integers at offsets 12 and
16 (decimal) in the highest-numbered db/log.* file in the repository.
Here is an example using GNU od: "
od -j12 -N8 -tx4
log.
". Here is an example using Mac OS X
hexdump: "
hexdump -s12 -n8 -x log.
".
The first integer should be the magic number 0x00040988, which
identifies the file as a Berkeley DB logfile. The second number is
the log format version
- match it to a Berkeley DB version using the table below:
Log format version
Berkeley DB version
5 (0x00000005)
4.0
7 (0x00000007)
4.1
8 (0x00000008)
4.2
10 (0x0000000a)
4.3
11 (0x0000000b)
4.4
12 (0x0000000c)
4.5
13 (0x0000000d)
4.6
Why is my repository taking up so much disk space?
The repository stores all your data in a Berkeley DB "environment"
in the repos/db/ subdirectory. The environment contains a collection
of tables and bunch of logfiles (log.*). Berkeley DB journals all
changes made to the tables, so that the tables can be recovered to a
consistent state in case of interruptions (
more info
).
The logfiles will grow forever, eating up disk space, unless you,
(as the repository administrator) do something about it. At any given
moment, Berkeley DB is only using a few logfiles actively (see
this post
and its associated thread); the rest can be safely
deleted. If you keep all the logfiles around forever, then in theory
Berkeley DB can replay every change to your repository from the day it
was born. But in practice, if you're making backups, it's probably
not worth the cost in disk space.
Use
svnadmin
to see
which log files can be deleted. You may want a cron job to do this.
$ svnadmin list-unused-dblogs /repos
/repos/db/log.000003
/repos/db/log.000004
[...]
$ svnadmin list-unused-dblogs /repos | xargs rm
# disk space reclaimed!
You could instead use Berkeley DB's
db_archive
command:
$ db_archive -a -h /repos/db | xargs rm
# disk space reclaimed!
See also
svnadmin hotcopy
or
hotbackup.py
Note:
If you use Berkeley DB 4.2, Subversion will
create new repositories with automatic log file removal enabled. You
can change this by passing the
--bdb-log-keep
option to
svnadmin create
. Refer to the
DB_LOG_AUTOREMOVE
flag
in the Berkeley DB manual located under
docs/api_c/env_set_flags.html#DB_LOG_AUTOREMOVE on the
Berkeley DB 4.2.x download package
My repository seems to get stuck all the
time, giving me errors about needing recovery (DB_RUNRECOVERY). What
could be the cause?
The Berkeley DB database in your repository is sensitive to
interruptions. If a process accessing the database exits without
"cleanly" closing the environment, then the database is left in an
inconsistent state. Common causes of this include:
the process exiting when it hits a permission problem
the process crashing/segfaulting
the process being forcibly killed
running out of disk space
For most of these cases, you should run "svnadmin recover", which
rewinds the repository back to a consistent state; see
this question
for details. Note that running
out of disk space, combined with frequent checkouts or updates, can
cause the repository to crash in a way where recovery is not possible
(so keep backups).
Segfaults, forced killings, and running out of disk space are
pretty rare. Permission problems are far more common: one process
accesses the repository and accidentally changes ownership or
permissions, then another process tries to access and chokes on the
permissions.
The best way to prevent this is to get your repository permissions
and ownership set up correctly. See
here
for our recommendations.
Every time I try to access my repository, the
process just hangs. Is my repository corrupt?
Your repository is not corrupt, nor is your data lost. If your process
accesses the repository directly (mod_dav_svn, svnlook, svnadmin, or
if you access a `file://' URL), then it's using Berkeley DB to access
your data. Berkeley DB is a journaling system, meaning that it logs
everything it is about to do before it does so. If your process is
interrupted (Control-C, or segfault), then a lockfile is left behind,
along with a logfile describing unfinished business. Any other
process that attempts to access the database will just hang, waiting
for the lockfile to disappear. To awaken your repository, you need to
ask Berkeley DB to either finish the work, or rewind the database to a
previous state that is known to be consistent.
WARNING:
you can seriously corrupt
your repository if you run recover and another process accesses the
repository.
Make absolutely sure you disable all access to the repository before
doing this (by shutting down Apache, removing executable permissions from
'svn'). Make sure you run this command as the user that owns and manages
the database, and not as root, else it will leave root-owned files in the
db directory which cannot be opened by the non-root user that manages the
database, which is typically either you or your Apache process. Also be
sure to have the correct umask set when you run recover, since failing to
do so will lock out users that are in the group allowed to access the
repository.
Simply run:
svnadmin recover /path/to/repos
Once the command has completed, check the permissions in the
db
directory of the repository.
Sometimes "svnadmin recover" doesn't work. You may see it
give errors like this:
Repository lock acquired.
Please wait; recovering the repository may take some time...
svnadmin: DB_RUNRECOVERY: Fatal error, run database recovery
svnadmin: bdb: Recovery function for LSN 175 7066018 failed on backward pass
svnadmin: bdb: PANIC: No such file or directory
svnadmin: bdb: PANIC: fatal region error detected; run recovery
or like this:
Repository lock acquired.
Please wait; recovering the repository may take some time...
svn: DB_RUNRECOVERY: Fatal error, run database recovery
svn: bdb: DB_ENV->log_flush: LSN of 115/802071 past current end-of-log
of 115/731460
svn: bdb: Database environment corrupt; the wrong log files may have
been removed or incompatible database files imported from another
environment
[...]
svn: bdb: changes: unable to flush page: 0
svn: bdb: txn_checkpoint: failed to flush the buffer cache Invalid argument
svn: bdb: PANIC: Invalid argument
svn: bdb: PANIC: fatal region error detected; run recovery
svn: bdb: PANIC: fatal region error detected; run recovery
[...]
In that case, try Berkeley DB's native
db_recover
utility
(see the Berkeley DB db_recover documentation located under
docs/utility/db_recover.html on the
Berkeley DB 4.2.x download package
). It usually lives in a "bin/"
subdirectory of the Berkeley DB installation, for example if you installed
Berkeley DB from source, it might be
/usr/local/BerkeleyDB.4.2/bin/db_recover
; or on systems where
Berkeley DB comes prepackaged it might just be
/usr/bin/db_recover
. If you have multiple versions of
Berkeley DB installed, make sure that the version of db_recover you
use matches the version of Berkeley DB with which your repository was
created.
Run db_recover with the "-c" ("catastrophic recovery") flag. You
can also add "-v" for verbosity, and "-h" with an argument telling it
what db environment to recover (so you don't have to cd into that
directory). Thus:
db_recover -c -v -h /path/to/repos/db
Run this command as the same user that owns the repository, and
again, make absolutely sure that no other processes are accessing the
repository while you do this (e.g., shut down svnserve or Apache).
My repository keeps giving errors saying "Cannot allocate memory".
What should I do?
If you're using http:// access, "
Cannot allocate memory
errors show up in the httpd error log and look something like
this:
[Wed Apr 07 04:26:10 2004] [error] [client 212.151.130.227] (20014)
Error string not specified yet: Berkeley DB error while opening
'strings' table for filesystem /usr/local/svn/repositories/svn/db:
Cannot allocate memory
[Wed Apr 07 04:26:10 2004] [error] [client 212.151.130.227]
Could not fetch resource information. [500, #0]
[Wed Apr 07 04:26:10 2004] [error] [client 212.151.130.227]
Could not open the requested SVN filesystem [500, #160029]
[Wed Apr 07 04:26:10 2004] [error] [client 212.151.130.227] (17)
File exists: Could not open the requested SVN filesystem [500, #160029]
It usually means that a Berkeley DB repository has run out of
database locks (this does not happen with FSFS repositories). It
shouldn't happen in the course of normal operations, but if it does,
the solution is to run database recovery as described
here
. If it happens often, you probably need
to raise the default lock parameters (
set_lk_max_locks
set_lk_max_lockers
, and
set_lk_max_objects
) in the
db/DB_CONFIG file. When changing DB_CONFIG in an existing repository,
remember to run recovery afterwards.
When I start Apache, mod_dav_svn complains about
a "bad database version", that it found db-3.X, rather than
db-4.X.
Your apr-util linked against DB-3, and svn linked against DB-4.
Unfortunately, the DB symbols aren't different. When mod_dav_svn is
loaded into Apache's process-space, it ends up resolving the
symbol names against apr-util's DB-3 library.
The solution is to make sure apr-util compiles against DB-4. You
can do this by passing specific switches to either apr-util's or
apache's configure: "--with-dbm=db4 --with-berkeley-db=/the/db/prefix".
I'm getting "Function not implemented" errors on Red Hat
9, and nothing works. How do I fix this?
This is not really a problem with Subversion, but it often affects
Subversion users.
Red Hat 9 and Fedora ship with a Berkeley DB library that relies on
the kernel support for NPTL (the Native Posix Threads Library).
The kernels that Red Hat provides have this support built in, but if you
compile your own kernel, then you may well not have the NPTL support. If that
is the case, then you will see errors like this:
svn: Berkeley DB error
svn: Berkeley DB error while creating environment for filesystem tester/db:
Function not implemented
This can be fixed in one of several ways:
Rebuild Berkeley DB for the kernel you're using.
Use a Red Hat 9 kernel.
Apply the NPTL patches to the kernel you're using.
Use a recent (2.5.x) kernel with the NPTL support included.
Check if environment variable
LD_ASSUME_KERNEL
is set
to
2.2.5
, and if so, unset it before starting
Subversion (Apache). (You usually would set this variable to run
Wine or Winex on Red Hat 9)
To use the NPTL version of Berkeley DB you also need to use a glibc
library with NPTL support, which probably means the i686 version. See
for details.
I'm getting the error "svn: bdb: call
implies an access method which is inconsistent with previous
calls". How do I fix this?
Berkeley DB 4.1 has shown itself to be rather unstable - both 4.0
and 4.2 are better. This error message is a symptom of one unique way
in which 4.1 will sometimes break.
The problem is that the database format field for one of the tables
that make up a Subversion repository using the Berkeley DB backend has
become corrupted. For unknown reasons, this is almost always the
'copies' table, which switches from the 'btree' type to the 'recno'
type. Simple recovery procedures are outlined below - if they do not
succeed, you should contact the Subversion Users
mailing list
Ensure that no other processes will attempt to access your
repository.
Now,
back up your repository
to a tar or zip file or
similar.
Change to the
db
subdirectory of your repository.
rm __db.* log.*
db_dump -p -r copies > copies.dump
Now edit
copies.dump
. In the section near the top,
change "
type=recno
" to "
type=btree
", and delete
the line beginning "
re_len=
".
rm copies
db_load copies < copies.dump
svnadmin dump .. > ../../my-recovered.svndump
Now create a new repository, reload the dump file just produced,
and copy across any custom hooks or configuration. Verify that the
highest revision number in the new repository is what you think it
should be.
After upgrading to Berkeley DB
4.3 or later, I'm seeing repository errors.
Prior to Berkeley DB 4.3,
svnadmin recover
worked to upgrade a
Berkeley DB repository in-place. However, due to a change in the behaviour
of Berkeley DB in version 4.3, this now fails.
Use this procedure to upgrade your repository in-place to Berkeley
DB 4.3 or later:
Make sure no process is accessing the repository (stop
Apache, svnserve, restrict access via file://, svnlook, svnadmin,
etc.)
Using an
older
svnadmin
binary (that is, linked to
an older Berkeley DB):
Recover the
repository: '
svnadmin recover /path/to/repository
Make a backup of the repository.
Delete all unused log files. You can see them by running
svnadmin list-unused-dblogs /path/to/repeository
Delete the shared-memory files. These are files in the
repository's
db/
directory, of the form
__db.00*
The repository is now usable by Berkeley DB 4.3.
Why do read-only operations still need repository
write access?
Certain client operations are "read-only", like checkouts and
updates. From an access-control standpoint, Apache treats them as
such. But libsvn_fs (the repository filesystem API) still has to
write temporary data in order to produce tree-deltas. So the process
accessing the repository always requires both read
and
write
access to the Berkeley DB files in order to function.
In particular, the repository responds to many "read-only"
operations by comparing two trees. One tree is the usually the HEAD
revision, and the other is often a temporary transaction-tree -- thus
the need for write access.
This limitation only applies to the Berkeley DB backend; the
FSFS backend
does not exhibit this behaviour.