Re: svn diff issue: svn confuses files with dirs on hfsplus?

Hi Andy

thanks for the reply. See below.

On 05/19/2010 10:14 PM, Andy Levy wrote:
> On Wed, May 19, 2010 at 15:40, Georg Kunz<georg.kunz_at_cs.rwth-aachen.de> wrote:
>> Hi!
>>
>> I encoutered a weird problem with subversion 1.6.6& 1.6.9 on a 32& 64bit
>> Xubuntu 10.04: My working copies are located on a hfsplus partition which is
>> shared across the Xubuntu Linux and MacOS on my development machine. For
>> some strange reason, I cannot diff single files in any working copies on
>> this partition:
>>
>> $> svn diff somefile
>> svn: Can't open file 'somefile/.svn/entries': Permission denied
>>
>> Weirdly, running
>>
>> $> svn diff
>>
>> works well, however, and shows a diff of all files as expected.
>>
>> After checking out the same repository to an ext3 partition, _both_ commands
>> work fine. Based on the error message above, I wonder why subversion
>> confuses a single file with a directory? Why is it looking for .svn/entries
>> that does obviously not exist?
>>
>> hfsplus is case insensitive, but I successfully used subversion on such a
>> partition for quite a while before. I suppose, the hfsplus partition is not
>> mounted correctly. These are the mount options I use in my fstab:
>>
>> UUID=... /media/Data hfsplus users,auto,exec,rw 0 0
>>
>> Any ideas that might help me solve the problem?
>
> Subversion works just fine on Macs. There are several people on this
> list using it, including the maintainer of the MacPorts Subversion
> package, IIRC.

Sure, I never doubted that and I used it on a Mac for a long time.

> I suspect your issue is not HFS+ and Subversion, it's that you're
> using the HFS+ partition with the Linux client. You can't safely share
> a single working copy between users and/or operating systems because
> (in your example) things done "the Linux way" when you're logged into
> Xubuntu won't work when you're using a client running on MacOS,
> expecting things to be done "the MacOS way".

To be precise here: the partition is shared to allow access from both
OSes, but ALL development stuff, i.e., all svn operations, are done
under Xubuntu only. So I don't share actually working copies across OSes
and svn clients.

> Subversion is not significantly aware of what happens at the
> filesystem level (and actually it's APR doing the heavy lifting, not
> Subversion itself), so it won't do a lot of checking to decide "I'm
> running on Linux, but it's an HFS+ partition, so I have to do things
> in this way instead of what I would do for ETX3."

Since I don't share working copies across OSes, Subversion doesn't need
to do such checks in my case. I am already getting the error when doing
a fresh checkout on Linux to the hfsplus partition and then doing a svn
diff on an arbitrary file. It also does not make a difference if I
actually change this file or not. So I am wondering why Subversion or
APR does not like hfsplus?

Georg