"svnadmin verify" dangerously broken

Corruption in the texts of files is not detected by "svnadmin verify".

Also, "svnadmin recover" can sometimes cause problems to appear!

Make a repository. Commit a file. Edit the "strings" db by changing some
characters.
"svnadmin verify" passes! "svnadmin dump" dumps the correct version!

"svnadmin recover". Recovery succeeds, but *now* "svnadmin dump" fails with
checksum errors! And "svnadmin verify" is *still* passing!

So, there are 2 issues.

1) "svnadmin verify" needs to actually read file contents, even though it
doesn't output it.

2) "svnadmin recover" can actually break a repository, if certain corruption
patterns have been applied to the database files. This is nasty, but also,
it means that unless recovery as just been run, svnadmin dump/verify are not
assessing the long-term validity of the repository - problems may
spontaneously develop when currently active logfiles are concluded.

Max.

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Received on Fri Aug 6 12:42:17 2004