Newbie: running svnserve on win32 as a service

Hi all

I am trying to run svnserve on win2000sp3 as a service. I am a newbie to
subversion, please apologize if I missed an obvious setting.

Basically, svnserve runs fine on the command line like that:

> svnserve -d -r f:\database\svnroot

The command line does not returns, but it works fine. The SVN client allows
to get the list of all folders within the repository (there is one):

> svn list svn://localhost
  /phga

I then tried to wrap svnserver with FireDaemon to start it automatically
with the server. I used the same command, but did not manage to get it
working.

The service starts, but then immediately shuts down, the log mentionning:

  svn: Bogus filename
  svn: Couldn't determine absolute path of 'f:/database/svnroot'

One the other hand, if I define an environnement variable
SVNROOT='f:\database\svnroot', and run it with the following command:

> svnserve -d -r %SVN_ROOT%

the service starts fine and FireDaemons logs that it nicely substituted
%SVN_ROOT% with f:\database\svnroot and that it executed the following
command:

  C:\PROGRA~1\Subversion\svnserve.exe -d -r f:/database/svnroot

svnserve does not claim about the "bogus filename". The service shows in the
list of running processes, but the repository content is not served:

> svn list svn://localhost
  svn: Couldn't find a repository
  svn: No repository found in 'svn://localhost'

I also tried to run it with SVN_ROOT=file:///f:/database/svnroot. svnserve
does not claim either (for a bogus filename) and gives the same error.

Has anybody managed to run svnserver as a win32 service?

Would you suggest another service wrapper?

By the way:

When I start svnserve on the command line with svnserve -r, it does not
accept any connection.

> svnserve -r f:\database\svnroot
  ( 1 1 ( ANONYMOUS ) ( ) )

> svn list svn://localhost
  svn: Can't connect to host 'localhost'

What is this mode for (without the -d switch)? Is it only working for Unix?

I also read that svnserve does not fork() on win32 and therefore would not
allow to run 'svn diff' and 'svn merge' commands. Is it definitely not
recommended to run svnserve on a win2000 server or might it fork() some day
and run as fine as on Unix?

Olivier

--
Le Petit Atelier de Genie logiciel
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