Comments on: using svnsync

By: Hans Meine

Hans Meine — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 18:50:39 +0000

I used
ln -s `which true` hooks/pre-revprop-change
to create an always-succeeding pre-revprop-change hook.

By: daniel

daniel — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 20:21:11 +0000

I think post-revprop-change needs to have this:

REV=”$2″

in it in order for ${REV} to have the correct value.

Thanks for the how-to!

By: Shinmin Wang

Shinmin Wang — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 17:36:04 +0000

My sychronization run was interrupted by a nightly backup program holding onto one of the files needed. And I had the same problem you described upon restarting the sync job. Thanks for the propdel solution that you gave, except that the svn subcommand that worked for me was ‘propdel’, not ‘propdelete’. I was prompted to do a ’svn help’ and it was quite easy to pick the right subcommand then. I’m on svn 1.4.4, Windows. Just want to share this with you.

By: Alex

Alex — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 16:34:24 +0000

Thanks a lot. I just added a link to this great howto on my blog, because many of my friends are searching for this solution without svk a long time :).

By: martin

martin — Sun, 30 Dec 2007 20:46:05 +0000

Thanks, that was just what I was looking for!!

Unfortunately, I ran into a problem, I ran the
- svnsync init ${TOREPOS} ${FROMREPOS} which run just fine,
but the
-svnscync sync ${TOREPOS} gave an unknown, at least to me, message:
-svnsync: Server doesn’t support the replay command
-svnsync: Unknown command ‘replay’

Is this maybe because the ${FROMREPOS} is still running svn 1.2.3?

By: Grégoire

Grégoire — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 11:07:03 +0000

@Chip […]
If you have any suggestions, they will be highly appreciated.
Grégoire.

By: Grégoire

Grégoire — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 11:03:07 +0000

@Chip […]
2. svnsync copy-revprops is not called from pre-revprop-change
- svnsync sync is called. Mirror is updated to rev x one hour of delay. During that time:
- commit in master of rev x+1
- revprop change to modify svn:log in master for rev x+1
- revprop change to modify svn:log in master for rev x-5
- svnsync sync is called. Mirror is updated to rev x+1 <= revprop change for rev x+1 will be populated correctly, not the revprop change for rev x-5

By: Grégoire

Grégoire — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 10:59:54 +0000

@Chip
Thank you for the reply. I’m setting up a repository mirror with svnsync and I’m a bit worried that the revision properties can change at any time. To be a perfect mirror, the only way to use svnsync is to put it in the post-commit hook and pre-revprop-change hook. Starting svnsync sinc once every x time to synchornize a mirror will most probably miss the revprop changes. And if svnsync copy-revprops is used in the pre-revprop-change, then svnsync sync has to be called from post-commit hook. Otherwise you put your mirror at risk. For instance:
1. svnsync sync is called from a script once every hour, svnsync copy-revprops called from the pre-revprop-change hook:
- svnsync sync is called. Mirror is updated to rev x one hour of delay. During that time:
- commit in master of rev x+1
- revprop change to modify svn:log in master for rev x+1
- svnsync copy-revprops called for rev x+1 <= x+1 is not yet commited in the mirror.

By: chip

chip — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 22:23:45 +0000

@Grégoire: Well, its whatever the old state is. Rev Props them selves are not versioned… so there isn’t a way to keep a ‘history’ of them.

By: Grégoire

Grégoire — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 10:17:15 +0000

[quote]
svnsync –non-interactive copy-revprops svn://dest.example.com/ ${REV} &
[/quote]
Anyone knows what is happening when a revprop is changed on a ${REV} which is not yet synchronized?

By: leopoldo.monzalvo@citigroup.com

leopoldo.monzalvo@citigroup.com — Wed, 25 Oct 2006 07:53:36 +0000

I followed the instructions showed in http://
>>> journal.paul.querna.org/articles/2006/09/14/using-svnsync and
>>> http://svn.collab.net/repos/svn/trunk/notes/svnsync.txt and was
>>> able to sync my repo using the following command:
>>>
svnsync init file:///export3/svnrep-bak/repos/svnsync/test file:///export3/svnrep/repos/svnsync/test

BUT, whenever I use URLs instead of file locations I get the error:

svnsync init http://ny390-sf01a:9050/svn/svnsync-bak/test http://ny390-sf01a:9050/svn/svnsync/test

svnsync: DAV request failed; it’s possible that the repository’s pre-revprop-change hook either failed or is non-existent
svnsync: At least one property change failed; repository is unchanged

My apache installations works fine since I am able to do normal repo operations (checkout, commit, update, etc) using URLs; permissions are set properly in destination repo as well.

Does somebody have any clue on what’s wrong ?

By: tuc

tuc — Tue, 17 Oct 2006 14:12:27 +0000

oh, and it’s “propdel”, not “propdelete”

By: tuc

tuc — Tue, 17 Oct 2006 13:49:24 +0000

btw, if you pass the –verbose flag to svn proplist, it will show you the value of each property.

svn proplist –revprop –verbose -r 0 ${TOREPO}

Thanks for providing this documentation. There isn’t much else to be found. Evidently there will be more with the 1.4.1 release.

By: Marc

Marc — Tue, 17 Oct 2006 13:17:56 +0000

Someone mentioned to me the other day that he keeps two Subversion repositories in sync by actually checking the repository into a second “meta-repository”. Interesting idea, but surely that is fraught with danger?

By: Paul Querna

Paul Querna — Tue, 26 Sep 2006 02:48:25 +0000

Ben:

Yeah, instead of just making an empty file, put “#!/bin/sh” inside it at the top, and it should fix it.

By: Andrew Chilton

Andrew Chilton — Tue, 26 Sep 2006 02:42:10 +0000

Wow, I didn’t realise the Subversion guys had done this - I’ve just run across it. It’s something I’d thought about before at a passing glance, but now I’m going to give it a go.

Thanks for the article.

By: Ben

Ben — Tue, 26 Sep 2006 02:22:14 +0000

Hi,

i tried your Howto, but it failed always, can you help me?

when i go this way like you:
$ touch hooks/pre-revprop-change
$ chmod 755 hooks/pre-revprop-change

i get after the init command the fallowing error:
svnsync: ‘pre-revprop-change’ hook failed with error output:

The output is empty, i think because the file, which is touched is also empty!?

when i copy the hooks/pre-revprop-change .tmpl to hooks/pre-revprop-change and make it executable i get this error, after the init command:
svnsync: ‘pre-revprop-change’ hook failed with error output:
Changing revision properties other than svn:log is prohibited

can you write me an answer if you know it?

thanks for your help!

ben

By: mark

mark — Wed, 20 Sep 2006 00:53:26 +0000

worrying about having a cached copy of credentials for teh secondary server is not necessary if you specify the –username and –password in the post-commit hook.

By: Stefano Spinucci

Stefano Spinucci — Tue, 19 Sep 2006 07:32:37 +0000

please note that on windows, as stated in the svn book, the commit hooks is done creating a blank file in the hooks/ directory named ‘pre-revprop-change.bat’

By: Garrett Rooney

Garrett Rooney — Thu, 14 Sep 2006 13:51:16 +0000

SVK also fails to produce 100% identical copies in some cases, due to the tricks it needs to play to figure out what’s going on in a revision from the log and diff APIs. Eventually it’ll be upgraded to take advantage of the new replay API we added for svnsync, but for now it’s not going to get you a 100% copy.

By: Duncan Murdoch

Duncan Murdoch — Thu, 14 Sep 2006 13:51:08 +0000

Now I’ve got it sync’d, what can I do with it?

I’d like to be able to browse the history of a file while offline; is there a way to tell svn that the working copy I have is mirrored locally?

And what are the long range plans? It would make lots of sense to me to delete the text-base originals from my working copy if I’ve got a copy of the repos available.

By: Paul Querna

Paul Querna — Thu, 14 Sep 2006 10:45:40 +0000

Yeah, Ive tried SVK, and it can ‘mirror’ a repository, but the biggest flaw with using SVK as a mirroring tool is that it doens’t preserve revision numbers prefectly in all cases.

By: Nicolas

Nicolas — Thu, 14 Sep 2006 08:53:54 +0000

Did you heard about svn:external?

By: Ben Lowery

Ben Lowery — Thu, 14 Sep 2006 07:09:10 +0000

Have you tried svk (http://svk.elixus.org/)?