Thursday, April 18, 2013

problems with git svn clone on windoze using cygwin

I am back in a windoze development environment and am using subversion (svn) for source code control. I am trying to experiment with git so I thought I would try to use git in conjunction with svn. This is turning out to be quite a bit of trouble. It all depends on which version of svn you are using.

Basically version 1.7 is fine but version 1.6 gives horrendous problems. Version 1.6 is being used because the server backend is version 1.6.

Googling reveals that the git svn clone problems in 1.6 are acknowledged and reported as fixed in version 1.7. Deep sigh. The problems are due to missing components. Several people have made attempts to build or install the missing components but I have not come across any success stories yet. And all my attempts failed.

You might think why not just move to version 1.7. Well, there's a reason and it's to do with a bit of svn nastiness. It is to do with repo format and compatibility and is discussed in the svn release notes at http://subversion.apache.org/docs/release-notes/1.7.html. The notes says:

Subversion 1.7 servers use the same repository format as Subversion 1.6. Therefore, it is possible to seamlessly upgrade and downgrade between 1.6.x and 1.7.x servers without changing the format of the on-disk repositories.

People have quoted this and concluded that:

There is no need to do anything, your working copy will be upgraded, and will still be able to talk to the 1.6 server.


However, someone on stackoverflow responded with:

Note: TortoiseSVN will update the working copy format which will create problems for older clients. This is only a problem if you have an environment where multiple different clients are used to access the same working copy. E.g. if you access the working copy from TortoisSVN and from IDE (e.g. PHPStorm) that only supports 1.6 working copy format.

This is exactly the issue for me. Changing to a 1.7 command line client forces me to change all clients. So that'll be native WIN32 command line, cygwin command line and TortoiseSVN. And all because the client changes the working copy so it won't work with older clients. I reckon this is a nasty on the part of SVN.

I am getting quite desperate to move to git now since I am grappling with some merge issues that are decidedly more awkward in svn. I may have to bite the bullet and change all my svn clients to be version 1.7. I hope to add to this blog entry to report any issues when I get around to making the move.


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