Many Pies

Many Pies

Monday, September 10, 2007

Subversion fun

I'm trying to bring in source code control on a lot of existing code. Just for fun I right click on a directory and choose "create repository here..." (I'm using TortoiseSVN). I get a choice:
Native filesystem or Berkeley database
So I click help. On the help page is the warning:
Warning

Do not create or access a Berkeley DB repository on a network share. It cannot exist on a remote filesystem. Not even if you have the network drive mapped to a drive letter. If you attempt to use Berkeley DB on a network share, the results are unpredictable - you may see mysterious errors right away, or it may be months before you discover that your repository database is subtly corrupted.


I'm glad I clicked help rather than guessing the right thing to do, as this directory is on a network share. Why couldn't subversion just see that it's a shared directory and not give me the choice?

2 comments:

Stefan Küng said...

You have the choice because you could create the repository on a network share, but then serve it via apache or svnserve.

I do that myself: the drive of the server where the repositories are located is accessible via network share, and whenever a new repository needs to be created I simply create it on the network share.
Then the server can serve it from there without any problems.

Paul Morriss said...

Thanks for that. It sounds like the helpfile could be a bit clearer.