So we've been setting up a new subversion server recently and eventually got it live yesterday, and things seemed to go smoothly.crack v rally p900

That is until some commits started failing randomly.crack v rally p900

Subversion has the concept of commit hooks, and in particular, a pre-commit hook that is called (you guessed it) before a transaction is committed. It simply executes any application or shell script, and aborts the transaction if the return value is non-zero. It's a very simple, yet powerful way of enforcing various conditions on how commits work.crack v rally p900

However, we found that about a third of the time, the pre-commit hook appeared to be failing. After various changes to the script to try and detect what was going on, we replaced it with a script that simply always returned 0 - i.e. it should always work.crack v rally p900

It still failed about a third of the time.crack v rally p900

Interesting... Especially since I extensively tested commits prior to go-live without any problems whatsoever.crack v rally p900

After lots of banging our heads against the desks, I eventually found a reference in a use group noting a potential incompatibility between Apache running subversion, and php. So I disabled php, and restarted Apache.crack v rally p900

It worked perfectly...crack v rally p900

After further investigation I now suspect that the problem is actually WebSVN, as it appears that the commit problems do not occur until after the web client is used to browse that repository. But as soon as the web client is used, commit failures seem to start occuring every so often. crack v rally p900

But that seems weird, as this would imply WebSVN, a web client specifically for Subversion, simply doesn't work. Maybe it is because we have a 64-bit machine, but I haven't been able to verify this.crack v rally p900

Anyway, we now have dropped WebSVN and installed ViewVC instead, and it appears (fingers crossed) to all be working correctly.crack v rally p900

Posted by Dave Bryant at 5:22 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0) crack v rally p900