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Re: Why doesn't svn use /tmp for temporary files ? (subversion: message 1 of 10)

From: Matthew Exon <matthew_exon_at_yahoo.com.au>
Date: 2006-05-11 19:22:11 CEST

Garrett Rooney - rooneg@electricjellyfish.net wrote:
> On 5/11/06, subversion.mexon@spamgourmet.com
> <subversion.mexon@spamgourmet.com> wrote:
>
>> Just a question, because I tripped over this and found it very
>> irritating. I've never used Subversion before, but have used CVS a lot.
>> I was going through the tutorial, importing a simple project, but
>> instead of using -m to put a comment on the command line, I left it off
>> so that it would bring up an editor (I'm a verbose guy, I like
>> multi-line comments). Subversion appears to use the CWD to hold the
>> comment file in this situation, meaning:
>>
>> 1) If I am importing the local directory, ".", I get a spurious file
>> svn-commit.tmp added to the repository. Googling online, I found
>> hundreds of "Deleted spurious svn-commit.tmp file" commit lines in
>> various people's repositories, so this problem seems pretty widespread.
>>
>> 2) I can't be in the root directory and run "svn import
>> ~/temp/myprojfect file:///~/repository/myproject", because I don't have
>> permission to create svn-commit.tmp.
>>
>> So why doesn't Subversion behave like CVS, and indeed every other unix
>> program, and use /tmp for temporary files? It seemed pretty
>> counterintuitive.
>>
>> It's svn version 1.1.4. I expected this to be an FAQ, but I couldn't
>> see anything there.
>
>
> Subversion often atomically copies temporary files into place, so that
> you either see all of a file or none of it. This doesn't work if
> you're copying between two filesystems, and since /tmp is often on a
> different filesystem than your working copy, that would be a problem.

OK. But in the case where I specify the full paths, subversion has no
idea which filesystem I'm in. I could have been in /tmp, in which case
it would have written there anyway. So writing the temporary file in
the CWD isn't a guarantee that it'll be atomic, right?

Anyway, is there a known bugs page for Subversion? You know, like the
known bugs section in manpages, for "bugs" that can't or shouldn't be
fixed. This seems like a candidate: annoying and counterintuitive, but
not incorrect.

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Received on Thu May 11 20:57:33 2006

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