Re: Inexcusable BDB upgrade triple blunder

On 2006.02.19 00:14:03 -0500, Eric S. Raymond wrote:
> Second blunder: the FAQ answer. Fix it with an older version of
> svnadmin? Sounds like a peachy idea -- until the svnadmin run fails
> because it doesn't see the right version of the SVN repo shared libraries to
> dynamic-link to. A 100% predictable roadblock about which the
> FAQ entry says *nothing*.

> Oh, and by the way, there's that marvelously vague instruction to
> 'make a backup'. Why? With what? And how does one tell if one needs
> to *use* the backup? In general, this FAQ entry is so dizzyingly
> useless to anyone who doesn't inhabit the skull of a Subversion
> developer that one is left to wonder that kind of drugs the dolt who
> wrote it was on.

I'm not a svn developer, yet I somehow managed.

Search the FAQ for "dump/load cycle". There's more than one way to
backup a svn repository, but "svnadmin dump" is the way to get a
completely version-independent one.

In theory, you only *need* to svnadmin dump / upgrade / svnadmin load
when the schema changes. Which hasn't happened since 1.0.

In practice, a dump/load cycle is easier than the kind of recovery you
attempted. Especially if you remembered to "svnadmin dump" *before* you
upgraded BDB, so you don't need to downgrade to do it. It may be slow
if the repository is big, though.

BDB is no longer the default backend in svn 1.2+, so this particular bit
of pain should mostly go away.

-- 
David Ripton    dripton@ripton.net
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