SVN stands for Sucks Voluminous Nads
[ sycobuny on Wed May 14 at 09:08 AM // category: // comments: 1 ]
I’m hating all over SVN right now. I’ve read people’s wildly ebullient reviews of it, and of version control in general. Version control seems like it’s still a good idea, but SVN is a horribly buggy implementation of it.
Everything was going swimmingly in my world, as I blissfully controlled the hell out of my versions. But then they upgraded SVN’s repository format and everything went to hell. It took me the better part of two days just to figure out what the sudden problem was with my repositories after updating TortoiseSVN (I do my devel on Windows, for Windows users). Turns out, once they upgrade a repository format, they toss the old format handling into the recycle bin. That makes perfect sense, since only everyone who’s using their software will then be presented with the problem of rebuilding their repositories.
Let me describe the process: you’re sitting there, eagerly foaming at the mouth while looking at the download bar tick away the percentage, your new version of SVN just moments away from installation. Everything’s done, you install, and you’re ready to go. But wait, no you’re not! Because suddenly you can’t check anything out, or commit any changes. Your repository has just turned into a big indecipherable lump of data.
Fortunately, there’s a way to solve this. You just have to uninstall your latest version of SVN, reinstall an old version, dump your repository (which gets ever more painful the longer you’ve had to build up revisions), uninstall the old version of SVN, reinstall the new version of SVN, and load the repository dump you just created (which is just as painful as dumping it). This is made easier by the utility created by SVN — oh, wait, they didn’t make one. So, you’re just going to have to sit there, stabbing needles into your genetalia for (relative) entertainment while the SVN dump process completes and you uninstall and reinstall SVN till you’re blue in the face.
I did this all a while ago, and somehow it all worked out. Now I’m coming up on a situation where an old repository I missed the first time isn’t set up to work right. Now it’s back to the old drawing board. I dump the repository, reinstall, and then go to load, but wait. Access denied? Oh dear, it seems like my dump file is all that’s left of my repository, because it can’t be bothered to load. I created a brand new repository and everything, and somehow access is denied. To svnadmin.
But, in the meantime, I go to check on my other repositories (which I can’t for the life of me remember how to set up such that they’re accessible to the outside world on Windows and god knows the docs don’t help). As they’re inaccessible through the svn:// protocol, I go through file://, but now I get a mysterious “Unable to open an ra_local session” message. So, now all of my local repositories are walled off from me as well.
My good friend Google is silent on the matter. Well, he’s not silent so much as Autistic. He gives me results but they don’t have any answers in them, just echoes of what I’m saying to it. Other people have the problem, but almost always on svn import rather than svn co and no one seems to be able to provide any good answers. I know it’s not a Windows-only problem at least, though, because almost all the examples are from a Linux (or Linux-style) OS.
I’ve got the latest version of SVN, and the latest version of TortoiseSVN now. Before, somehow I was able to run SVN 1.3 and TortoiseSVN 1.4 and have them both interact with repositories, which should be impossible (1.3 uses format 3, 1.4 uses format 5). But, it worked. Now I try to do it the way I’m advised and everything breaks. Maybe I’ve missed something painfully obvious, or maybe SVN just sucks. I’m hoping it’s the former, because if it’s the latter then that means all my code for several projects stored locally is lost.
Thanks, SVN! You’re a pal!
-- sycobuny // 2008.05.14 @ 09:08 AM
1 Comments
Comment #60
[ rakaur on Wed May 14 at 06:25 PM ]
This is why I stopped programming. Well, not really, but it helped.
-- rakaur // 2008.05.14 @ 06:25 PM
