git svn dcommit to sourceforge fails but it works via svn directly

Question

I'm working on a Open Source project on SourceForge that uses Subversion. A few days ago I did a git svn clone and started tracking my changes using Git.

After a while I tried to dcommit my changes back upstream. But that failed with the following error:

Autorisierung schlug fehl: MKACTIVITY von »/svnroot/housebot/!svn/act/b8dbd0ff-f224-4899-b6fe-06a514fa2dbf«: Autorisierung schlug fehl: Could not authenticate to server: rejected Basic challenge (https://housebot.svn.sourceforge.net) at /sw/lib/git/git-svn line 3649

(Please ignore the german. It says something like "Authorization failed".). So I thought that my SSH key was setup incorrectly, but when I try to commit changes through svn it works perfectly fine.

So I'm at a loss to what's actually going wrong here. I would have assumed that it would either work in both svn and git svn or not at all.

Answer 1

Erm... When you access the repository via HTTPS + WebDAV (like the error message suggests), no SSH keys will be used, but plain usernames and passwords...

So either set your correct username and password, or use svn+ssh instead of https (although I don't know whether sourceforge supports svn+ssh for Subversion).

Note that Subversion at SourceForge is set up so that you can checkout and update anonymously, but need your password for commit. This is useful if you want to prepare a patch for a project where you are not member (yet), and want to commit it later when you are member of it. But it triggers some corner cases in code when you first try to commit your changes.

Answer 2

Can you post the steps you took when setting up your svn repo to be tracked by git? It sounds like you missed something along the way. It's weird that you were able to clone the repo without any errors but get errors when dcommitting.

I'm going to take a shot in the dark, but it sounds like you forgot to run "git svn rebase" after your initial clone of the svn repo. I've been burned by that in the pass.