Misleading error report

I recently created some new binary files. I happened to pick a name for these
that ended in ".data", thinking that would remind me and others in the future
that this was just data.

Because I'm an Apache committer, I had followed the svn config setup in
http://apache.org/dev/svn-eol-style.txt. I had done this many years ago :-).

When I tried to commit the new data files to SVN, I got this error message:

add -N C:\xxxx....\xxx.data
    Illegal target for the requested operation
svn: File 'C:\xxxx....\xxx.data' has binary mime type property

I'm sorry to say this message wasn't very helpful. I knew the file was
"binary". I've added binary files before to SVN. This message gave no reason
why the file was "illegal".

The answer turned out to be in that Apache standard configuration file for SVN -
it specified that files ending with ".data" should have the svn property
svn:eol-style=native.

A wonderful error message would have been something like the following:

Illegal target for the requested operation because the target file is a binary
file, and that is conflicting with the svn property eol-style=native, which is
automatically being added because the file type is matching a rule for this in
the svn configuration file, located here: xxxx; fix this by any of the following
actions: change the file type to something that doesn't match a rule in the
configuration file that is adding the conflicting property, or change the
configuration file rules to not add the conflicting property.

I'm not subscribed to the list, so if you wish, please cc: me on any replies.

-Marshall Schor
Received on 2013-03-26 21:52:05 CET