TheNitai

Somehow with the recent Ubuntu 10.04 LTS updates or maybe with a subversion update, I received some errors message of the type “locale…”. To be more precise the errors are;

svn: warning: cannot set LC_CTYPE locale
svn: warning: environment variable LC_CTYPE is UTF-8
svn: warning: please check that your locale name is correct

So, if you want to fix this all you have to do is to set the “LC_ALL” variable manually. To make it permanent just edit the file “/etc/environment” and add the line:

LC_ALL=C

Save the file and exit the editor. In order for it to apply you have to logout of the current shell session. The next time you log in, the issue with SVN will be gone.

We just moved some of our subversion repositories to a new server and with it changed the URL’s. Now, in order to change any existing checkout version to grab updates from the new subversion server we issued the simple “switch” command from subversion as in:

svn sw svn://svn.domain.com/trunk .

The problem with this was that the system complained with:

svn: 'svn://svn.domain.com/trunk'
is not the same repository as
'svn://svn.newdomain.com/trunk'

The correct syntax to relocate any existing checkout copy is to use the “–relocate” switch as in:

svn sw --relocate svn://svn.domain.com/trunk svn://svn.newdomain.com/trunk 

And we are back in business…

I run into some issues trying to update subversion on our Linux 64-bit (CentOS) servers. In other words, RPM always complained on some missing dependencies from a old version and aborted the upgrade. The error lines were of the nature;

Transaction Check Error:
file /{filesuchandsuch} from install of subversion-1.5.6-0.1.el5.rf

I mean, I had the old subversion installed and wanted to update to the new one. Isn’t that what a update is all about?

After trying to remove, reinstall and reconfigure subversion I tried the update again, just to find out that it still did not work. So, i started to dig into CentOS and found that during the installation of subversion the RPM installed both the 64-bit and the 32-bit versions.

Since, I did not need the 32-bit version I removed it with;

rpm erase subversion.i386

Then tried updating subversion again with;

svn update subversion

BINGO! Apparently the 32-bit version interfered with the update. Removing it solved it.

We recently moved most of our servers. In the move we also upgraded our subversion server to the latest version (1.5.x). All went very well, except that our Jira (Jira is this great Feature and Bug-Tracking tool from Atlassian) could not see the subversion repository anymore.

The error we got was “svn: malformed network …”.

I suspected that, with the move to the latest version of subversion, the connection to subversion within Jira must use .jar files which were only compatible with subversion 1.4. Indeed, that was the case.

So, if you run into this, just download the latest SVNKit from http://svnkit.com (it is the standalone version), extract it and copy the svnkit.jar file to the directory “{jira-root}/atlassian-jira/WEB-INF/lib/”. Make sure that you remove the older svnkit-1.16.jar file or any other svnkit-xxx.jar file. Then restart Jira.