Why must I use local path rather than 'svn://' with SVN bindings?

Question

I'm using the Ruby SVN bindings built with SWIG. Here's a little tutorial.

When I do this

@repository = Svn::Repos.open('/path/to/repository')

I can access the repository fine. But when I do this

@repository = Svn::Repos.open('svn://localhost/some/path')

It fails with

/SourceCache/subversion/subversion-35/subversion/subversion/libsvn_subr/io.c:2710: 2: Can't open file 'svn://localhost/format': No such file or directory

When I do this from the command line, I do get output

svn ls svn://localhost/some/path

Any ideas why I can't use the svn:// protocol?

EDIT

Here's what I ended up doing, and it works.

require 'svn/ra'

class SvnWrapper
  def initialize(repository_uri, repository_username, repository_password)
    # Remove any trailing slashes from the path, as the SVN library will choke
    # if it finds any.
    @repository_uri = repository_uri.gsub(/[\/]+$/, '')

    # Initialize repository session.
    @context = Svn::Client::Context.new
    @context.add_simple_prompt_provider(0) do |cred, realm, username, may_save|
      cred.username = repository_username
      cred.password = repository_password
      cred.may_save = true
    end

    config = {}
    callbacks = Svn::Ra::Callbacks.new(@context.auth_baton)
    @session = Svn::Ra::Session.open(@repository_uri, config, callbacks)
  end

  def ls(relative_path, revision = nil)
    relative_path = relative_path.gsub(/^[\/]+/, '').gsub(/[\/]+$/, '')
    entries, properties = @session.dir(relative_path, revision)

    return entries.keys.sort
  end

  def info(relative_path, revision = nil)
    path = File.join(@repository_uri, relative_path)
    data = {}

    @context.info(path, revision) do |dummy, infoStruct|
      # These values are enumerated at http://svn.collab.net/svn-doxygen/structsvn__info__t.html.
      data['url'] = infoStruct.URL
      data['revision'] = infoStruct.rev
      data['kind'] = infoStruct.kind
      data['repository_root_url'] = infoStruct.repos_root_url
      data['repository_uuid'] = infoStruct.repos_UUID
      data['last_changed_revision'] = infoStruct.last_changed_rev
      data['last_changed_date'] = infoStruct.last_changed_date
      data['last_changed_author'] = infoStruct.last_changed_author
      data['lock'] = infoStruct.lock
    end

    return data
  end
end

Enjoy.

Answer 1

The svn command is a client. It communicates with the Subversion server using several protocols (http(s)://, svn:// and file:///).

Repos.open is a repository function (much like svnadmin for instance). It operates directly on the database, and doesn't use a client protocol to communicate with the server.