SVN 1.4: #$%&§*ing UTF-8 problems

Hi!

I have a medium size Drupal web application project the PHP source part of
which I am managing with subversion. The application is running on a
SuSE 10 server which I unfortunately can't upgrade at present for some
other compatibility reasons, so I seem to be stuck with subvrsion
1.4.4 if I do not want to replace the packaged version with a
standalone version compiled from latest sources.

The trouble seems to be:

There is a public upload directory named "files" in the web
application root directory. People will upload their files to this
directory from all types of client systems, especially the crappy ones
from MS. Filenames therefore vary hugely and do not follow any
conventions or standards.

So everytime I do something with subversion in the root directory, I
get a message such as:

svn: Valid UTF-8 data
(hex: 31 2e 46 43 5f 4e 75)
followed by invalid UTF-8 sequence
(hex: df 62 61 75)

which is perfectly expectabla when files come with obscure filename
encodings from hell. The files directory naturally is NOT kept under
version control.

Of course I tried to add the files directory to svn:ignore, but it does
not work. svn complains about the UTF-8 problems anyway. I guess the
"ignore" part comes at a later stage after looking into the directory
and stumbling over the filenames.

So normally I resolve to do something like

svn update [^f]*

to do the update on all sane directories, but now I
have to switch the branch from trunk to something else on the live
system. With svn switch, this trick does not seem to work.

Does anybody have any idea how to resolve this? Could I make this work with a
recent version of subversion?

-- 
peter koellner <peter_at_asgalon.net>
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