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Re: Problems with using a symbolic link for .svn folder on TSVN

From: Branko Čibej <brane_at_apache.org>
Date: Thu, 10 Jan 2019 13:39:07 +0100

On 09.01.2019 19:10, Oscar Lee wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I was told to post my issue here from a TSVN dev.
>
> My company uses TortoiseSVN internally to keep our files updated. The .svn
> folder for the project I have is massive (250GB) and as such I had to move
> it off to an external HDD. I created a symbolic link to the new location so
> that TortoiseSVN 'should' still continue to work.

Well, it "should" not, see below.

But if your .svn/ directory is much bigger than the rest of your working
copy, then 'svn cleanup --vacuum-pristines' will probably reduce its
size. In TSVN you'll have to select the checkbox "Vacuum pristine copies".

> I managed to run a clean-up, but when I tried to revert a file, it gave me
> an error 'Failed to run the WC DB work queue associated with (file)" and
> "Can't move (tmp file) to ... (original file): The system cannot move the
> file to a different disk drive".
>
> I found that this error is caused by Windows not letting a file be renamed
> while it is being moved (
> https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/ms837428(v=msdn.10)).
> Does anyone know a solution to this? Why is this an issue that only occurs
> with a symbolic link setup?

This has nothing to do with symbolic links but with the fact that
Subversion, during normal operations, has to atomically rename (and
move) a file from somewhere in the .svn/ directory to its expected
location in the working copy. Windows can't do that if the source and
target of the rename are on different volumes, that's what the error
message is telling you. The explanation your link points to is
misleading, to put it mildly ... it's the move to a different volume
that fails, not the renaming of the file.

-- Brane
Received on 2019-01-10 13:39:16 CET

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