Ubuntu – Unable to run svn commands on a repository version 1.7

svn

I'm unable to run svn commands in an existing repository.

Running svn status results in this :

gene@gene-ThinkPad-T60p:~/Dropbox/CDS$ svn status
svn: The path '.' appears to be part of a Subversion 1.7 or greater
working copy. Please upgrade your Subversion client to use this
working copy.

After some googling I thought that the right thing to do would be to run svn upgrade, (but this was a red herring, upgrade doesn't upgrade your installation of SVN, it upgrades the version implicit in the project). In any event, upgrade is not available in version 1.6

gene@gene-ThinkPad-T60p:~/Dropbox/CDS$ svn upgrade
Unknown command: 'upgrade'
Type 'svn help' for usage.

I tried to update of subversion (aka svn at the command lines)
I tried sudo apt-get update then sudo apt-get upgrade, with no effect.
I also tried sudo apt-get install subversion, with no effect.

I downloaded the source code and tried building subversion, but I got this error
after running ./configure

…truncated…

/bin/grep -E checking whether ln -s works… yes checking for a
BSD-compatible install… /usr/bin/install -c configure: Apache
Portable Runtime (APR) library configuration checking for APR… no
configure: WARNING: APR not found The Apache Portable Runtime (APR)
library cannot be found. Please install APR on this system and
configure Subversion with the appropriate –with-apr option.

You probably need to do something similar with the Apache Portable
Runtime Utility (APRUTIL) library and then configure Subversion with
both the –with-apr and –with-apr-util options.

configure: error: no suitable APR found

I had already read a few pages about the APR utility in the readme for SVN, but it seemed very involved. Maybe APRUTIL is for installing the server version of SVN rather than the client?

This command sudo apt-get install libapache2-svn says that I'm already at the most current version.

(edit:)
When I try sudo apt-get install subversion it says that I'm at the newest version

Reading package lists… Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information… Done
subversion is already the newest version.
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 1 not upgraded.

But, my current version (based on svn --version) is svn, version 1.6.17 (r1128011) compiled Jun 26 2013, 20:44:02. This seems recent to me, but according to the website they're already on 1.8.

Thanks in advance for any help.

Best Answer

There is a little twist. You say you try svn update but the code shows svn upgrade which fails, then you say "so i tried svn upgrade".

My gut says you have a working copy on version 1.7 copied from somewhere and version 1.6 of subversion can't cope with it. The simplest solution would be to svn checkout a fresh working copy from the repository.

If you really need to downgrade your working copy from 1.7 to 1.6, then you have a problem, I am afraid.

The APR is a general purpose library that was developed for the Apache http server, but it is used by all subversion programs. Therefore you need to install it in order to build any subversion software. libapache-svn is a different matter.

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