SVN problems in Debian Squeeze/testing

If you get error messages like “svn: OPTIONS of ‘http://svn.example.com/svn/module’: could not connect to server (http://svn.example.com)” in Debian Squeeze/testing, you probably have the same problem as I. It appears that recently a broken neon library was transferred to debian/testing repository, what broke subversion client functionality. There are few options.

First, you can wait until fixed versions of those packages are included and then upgrade them – but God only knows when this will happen.

Second, you can get fixed packages from unstable branch of Debian repository. This generally works, but you would have to include all dependent packages, what could be quite large amount. All necessary packages can be found here, but I didn’t test them.

Third option, which I have chosen, is to do a temporary fix by adding line http-library=serf to your  ~/.subversion/servers file, and after new packages are available, upgrade them.

3 thoughts on “SVN problems in Debian Squeeze/testing”

  1. Possible solution for the “The OPTIONS response did not include the requested version-controlled-configuration value” is in complete removing the svn-handled files/directories and download (svn checkout) them again…But this is not comfortable, better solution must be found.

  2. I had this problem in the past, solved it like in the post above. Recently, trying to checkout yafaray, I got the error message mentioned in comment #4. Curiously, I had to comment out the http-library=serf line, and it worked… Probably the problem is fixed in debian’s svn, but thanks for this post, that reminded me to check the svn config file!

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