SVN Server Overview

• http://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.7/svn.serverconfig.choosing.html

http, apache

Apache runs as nobody and writes into the repo:

[blyth@cms02 ~]$ ll /var/scm/repos/newtest/
total 72
-rw-r--r--  1 nobody nobody  229 May  1  2012 README.txt
drwxr-xr-x  2 nobody nobody 4096 May  1  2012 locks
drwxr-xr-x  2 nobody nobody 4096 May  1  2012 hooks
-r--r--r--  1 nobody nobody    2 May  1  2012 format
drwxr-xr-x  2 nobody nobody 4096 May  1  2012 dav
drwxr-xr-x  2 nobody nobody 4096 May  1  2012 conf
drwxr-xr-x  7 nobody nobody 4096 May  1  2012 .
drwxr-xr-x  8 nobody nobody 4096 May  7  2012 ..
drwxr-sr-x  5 nobody nobody 4096 Jul 30  2012 db

svn+ssh, svnserve

This can be configured to work in parallel with access via apache.

• http://svnbook.red-bean.com/nightly/en/svn.serverconfig.multimethod.html

It works by ssh starting a temporary svnserve -t which runs as the user invoking the command. Thus lots of care needed to avoid permissions problems.

Advantages:

1. potentially faster than http as more stateful
2. historically C2 http has been unexplicably blocked for months at a time from N, this would provide a workaround
   • but looking into the issues, suspect that tunnelling http over ssh would be easier than diddling with temporary svnserve

svn+ssh trial

Warning

CAUTION potential to mess up repo permissions, restrict to test repos

[blyth@belle7 ~]$ svn co svn+ssh://blyth@dayabay.phys.ntu.edu.tw/var/scm/repos/newtest
svn: Expected version '3' of repository; found version '5'

Adjusting PATH and LD_LIBRARY_PATH in C2:.cshrc did not resolve the reported incompatibility but it did change the svnserve version presumably being used:

[blyth@belle7 ~]$ ssh C2 "tcsh -c \"which svnserve\""
/usr/bin/svnserve
[blyth@belle7 ~]$ ssh C2 "tcsh -c \"which svnserve\""
/data/env/system/svn/subversion-1.4.6/bin/svnserve

Kinda difficult to debug as its a temporary tunnel.