Re: WinXP Checkout From svnserve Fails Partway Through

On Wednesday 28 September 2005 10:16, you wrote:

> Windows uses a case-insensitive file system.
>

Well, FAT is case-insensitive, but NTFS is said to be case-preserving (meaning
that 'so4.pdb' will be displayed as 'so4.pdb', 'SO4.pdb' as 'SO4.pdb', but if
you have 'so4.pdb' you can not create 'SO4.pdb' independently).

> > NB. it would be probably helpful if TortoiseSVN gave somewhat more
> > informative error message in the described situation...

> That is not TSVN's job.  It only knows what Subversion tells it.

Sure. I do not mean that TSVN should (or could) _correct_ the situation; yet
it would be nice if TSVN would _diagnose_ the situation and explain what to
do.

Now, AFAIU, it goes like this: TSVN gets 'so4.pdb', puts it onto the Windows
disk, creates some internal information in .svn/ directory; then gets
'SO4.pdb', puts it on the disk (probably silently overwriting the existing
'so4.pdb'), rushes to create the internal information for this file as well
and -- oops! -- some files already exist, or some files are missing, or
whatever. Unfortunately, we end up with a very confusing error message: "svn:
Can't copy
'SvnTestCo\current\www\.svn\tmp\text-base\mscactivecalls.htm.svn-base' to
'SvnTestCo\current\www\mscactivecalls.htm.tmp': The system cannot find the
file specified."

It would be much easier and less confusing to learn that "File
'mscactivecalls.htm' can not be stored on your Windows (NTFS) filesystem,
because the file 'MScactivecalls.htm' already exists. Rename/Skip/Abort?"

-- 
Dr. Saulius Grazulis
Institute of Biotechnology
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