A few times already, I got into situations where one of my SVN repository got corrupt and we could do anything with some versions or branches of the project without really knowing what we did. So I'm asking what can cause a repository to become corrupt?
+1
A:
Potential filesystem corruption or someone mucking around with the internal svn directories?
grepsedawk
2008-12-03 01:31:09
A:
I've had it happen a few times. SVN doesn't seem to cope well if the client goes away while the server is taking a long time to do certain things. I don't know the exact details, but I have done a few kill -9s on what I thought were read-only processes and ended up having to run a svnadmin cleanup afterwards before the server would respond again.
Ant P.
2008-12-03 01:39:19
There are no read-only processes in svn; it always creates a transaction, even for updating. See http://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.0/ch05.html#svn-ch-5-sect-1.1 for the details.
CesarB
2008-12-03 10:52:22
svnadmin doesn't have a cleanup command. svn cleanup is a clientside command. In all cases except file:/// repository access a client crash/hang can never harm the server or the data.. And file:/// access over the network is certainly not recommended practice.
Bert Huijben
2008-12-03 11:13:04
@Bert: Whoops, I meant svnadmin recover.
Ant P.
2008-12-03 16:41:29
A:
This is quite common on File based repos, however if you have a single user / service accessing the repo, this will not happen.
PostMan
2008-12-03 03:15:14
+1
A:
There is always the possibility that the hardware is faulty. Things like bit errors in memory can cause silent corruption instead of simply crashing the computer; if a svn server process is the one affected, the repository can become corrupted.
CesarB
2008-12-03 10:43:23
A:
It seems that incompatibilities between clients may cause problems, more specifically with character sets.
Loki
2008-12-03 17:56:40
+5
A:
There are basically three distinct cases:
- Faulty hardware (memory, fs corruption, etc.)
- User's with login access to the server can corrupt repository files.
- Bugs in Subversion.
Faulty hardware is usually the most difficult to spot, except in the most obvious cases. Case 2 is preventable by limiting login access to the server. Everything else is a bug in Subversion. (This includes compatibility issues between client and the server.) You should never be able to corrupt the repository just by using a Subversion client (not even when there is a bug in the client, IMO).
JesperE
2008-12-03 18:31:06
A:
I had a repo corruption that took me a while to figure out. On the server I had accidentally changed the owner of the .svn dir in the repo to some unrelated user. SVN gave me corruption errors after that until I deleted and re-created the repo. Even after I corrected it. smacks forehead
DeviousBlue
2010-09-01 18:44:30