Hosting a subversion working copy in an remote WebDAV folder
- by Daniel Baulig
This might be a bit awkward, but I'll try to explain what I am trying to achieve and what problems I encountered. First of all: whats this about?
I am currently trying to set up a distributed working enviroment for developing a web page. My plan was to setup a SVN repository for version control, a live server where the actual live page ist hosted and a development server where I can work on the page.
To ease things I intended to not have a local copy of the project on my disk, but to actually work directy on the files, that the development server hosts. For that I setup a WebDAV directory, under devserver.com/workspace, that actually mapped to files served under devserver.com/. So I could connect to devserver.com/workspace, change something and view the results live at devserver.com/. So far this worked perfectly.
The next step was to create a SVN repository that would take care of my version control. I intended to be able to checkin to the reposiroty from my development server and at any time, with a small shell script, deploy any revision from the svn to the live server by checking out a copy of the revision into the live server directories. The second part, checking out into the live server, also worked perfectly. The first part though is where problems arose:
My workstation is a Windows 7 machine. I connected to the WebDAV share using Windows built-in WebDAV support, which worked quite well. I can create, move, delete, edit, whatever files on my WebDAV share from my Windows machine perfectly. The next step was to checkout a working copy from the SVN (actually hosted at devserver.com/subversion/) into the WebDAV share. In the first try I used the Eclipse plugin subversive. The actual checkout worked fine and I can update and commit stuff to the repository, however, I cannot add any files to the ignore list. It always brings me an error.
So I tried the same thing with a complete fresh repository using TortoiseSVN - and again it failed with the same errors. Here is what it says when trying to add files to svnignore:
Some of selected resources were not added to ignore.
svn: Cannot rename file '\\devserver.com@SSL\DavWWWRoot\workspace\.svn\tmp\dir-props.66fd8936-2701-0010-bb76-472f0b56a5d1.tmp' to '\\devserver.com@SSL\DavWWWRoot\workspace\.svn\tmp\dir-props'
This is what apache2 tells me, when I try to add a file to svnignore:
[Sun Mar 07 03:54:19 2010] [error] [client xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx] Negotiation: discovered file(s) matching request: /var/www/devserver.com/.svn/tmp/dir-props (None could be negotiated).
[Sun Mar 07 03:54:31 2010] [error] [client xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx] (20)Not a directory: The URL contains extraneous path components. The resource could not be identified. [400, #0]
Actually both messages are repeated several times. The first one occurs first and is repeated about 5 times and the second comes there after and is repeated propably more than 20 times. If I create a regular file, delete, rename or modify it none of those messages appear in my error.log
While writing this question now I was able to add fils to svnignore using TortoiseSVN. However, after that, Eclipse would not let me commit anymore. The error that used to pop up when adding files to svnignore now also shows up while commiting.
While searching the web I found some people having this same message appearing because they had files only different in upper- / lower-case naming. I checked my repository and did not find such files.
I also read somewhere about people having troubles with WebDAV and file locking, because WebDAV's file locking capabilities seem to be very limited. At some stage I got errors telling me my repository was locked and thus the operations could not be completed. This error though did not appear anymore, since I setup a completely fresh repository and working copy.
I would really appreciate any help anyone can provide me in fixing this problem! If there are any more questions feel free to ask. I know this is a somewhat unusual setup.
Best regards,
Daniel
