Re: Random files being "reverted" on one repository

On Wednesday 11 May 2011, Dave Tingling wrote:
> Hi List,
>
> We administer subversion (v 1.4.2, r22196 on CentOS 5.5) for a
> development company, and have over 150 active repositories, but we are
> not subversion experts. We are experiencing an issue with just one
> particular repository.
>
> When programmers run an update against this one repository (using either
> TortoiseSVN 1.6.15 or Slik Subversion 1.6.16 on Windows 7 Pro SP1), they
> observe that they sometimes get---to coin their term---"frankenstein"
> versions of arbitrary files. As an example scenario:
>
> 1) - Developer A: adds, edits and commits a file X,
> 2) - Developer A: later, again edits and commits file X,
> 3) - Developer A: still later, again edits and commits file X,
> 4) - Developer N: who has never before seen file X, runs an update. She
> gets a weird version of file X which contains only *some* lines of the
> set of changes made by Developer A in each of the edit/commit sessions
> (1), (2), and (3).
>
> We cannot replicate the problem on demand, but it recurs with
> (seemingly) random files at random times. The worst thing is that when
> an update silently "reverts" some unknown file (to a "frankenstein"
> version), it is subsequently committed as a new version by the
> unsuspecting developer.
>
> We've tried exporting and re-importing the code to a new repository, but
> the issue has persisted. "Svnadmin verify" finds no errors in any
> revisions. Our latest move was to disable the Windows Search service,
> but if that's really the problem, our other developers should be seeing
> this with other repositories. Any advice on how to
> duplicate/troubleshoot the cause of this problem will be greatly
> appreciated.
>
> Thank you,
> Dave

Hi, I've seen something like this before when some of the users were remote nd
were accessing the repository via a SVK mirror. The mirror was reverting
files prior to committing to what I presume it thought the state should be.
This was some years ago, but if I recall correctly the commits for the
reverted files did not have any commit message. I don't know if it was an
artifact of the setup we had (I never did the setup) but commits coming via
the SVK mirror would be from a single user but the real user would be part of
the commit message. Could something like this be happening for you?

Campbell

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