SVN and Berkeley 4.3


For any of my Mac-using readers who also have a local installation of Subversion, the excellent version control system, this post may interest you.

I recently (today) tried to commit some work to a local repository on my computer that I haven’t used in a while (couple months). Once I realized that I didn’t have the =svnserve= running, and got that sorted out, I ran into an issue with the Berkeley database that subversion uses. My guess is that one of the recent updates to the OS, maybe the last one: 10.4.8, updated the version of Berkeley db on my system. It is possible that I did it myself when I was updating some packages in fink, but in any case, if you run into the same problem, there is a solution here: http://subversion.tigris.org/faq.html. If you haven’t upgraded subversion, then you will still have an “older” svnadmin binary. The only thing to note about the instructions is that there is an error that you will get from running the recover command, like this one:

svnadmin: DB_RUNRECOVERY: Fatal error, run database
recovery
svnadmin: bdb: /path/to/repository/db/log.0000000002:
log file open failed: No such file or directory
svnadmin: bdb: PANIC: No such file or directory
svnadmin: bdb: DB_ENV->log_put: 2: DB_RUNRECOVERY:
Fatal error, run database recovery

Apparently this can be ignored. I did, and things seem to be working again. Make sure you back up the repositories before you start too… just in case.

Written by Colin Bate