Get svn revision without an appropriate svn binary installed

Question

For some reason, we can't update the SVN in some build machines. Installed svn version is 1.3.x. But Hudson slave used 1.6 to create a checkout. This means we can't run "svn info" on those checkouts:

$ svnversion 
subversion/libsvn_wc/questions.c:110: (apr_err=155021)
svn: This client is too old to work with working copy '.'; please get a newer Subversion client
$ svn info
subversion/libsvn_wc/questions.c:110: (apr_err=155021)
svn: This client is too old to work with working copy '.'; please get a newer Subversion client
$

My question, is there a way to access the revision number without having to invoking the svn binary? You know, like trying to look into the .svn/ directory? Assume that the checkout is using latest svn version (1.6).

Answer 1

I found an answer to this by looking at setuptools source code (setuptools/command/egg_info.py)

        entries_file = join(dirname(__file__), '.svn', 'entries')
        assert exists(entries_file), '%s is missing' % entries_file
        with open(entries_file) as f:
            data = f.read()
            # parsing code inherited from setuptools/command/egg_info.py
            if data.startswith('<?xml'):
                localrev = max([int(m.group(1)) for m in revre.finditer(data)]+[0])
            else:
                if data<8:
                    raise Exception, "unrecognized .svn/entries format"

                data = map(str.splitlines,data.split('\n\x0c\n'))
                del data[0][0]  # get rid of the '8' or '9'
                localrev = max([int(d[9]) for d in data if len(d)>9 and d[9]]+[0])