A Subversion oddity on MacOS X
I’ve recently been struggling to check out a large subversion repository on my Mac. Each time I tried I’d get an error like:
svn: Can't open file '..../.svn/tmp/some_path/some_file.svn-base': No such file or directory
I had no such problems checking out the same repository on a Linux system. This was somewhat puzzling.
Finally, the answer dawned on me. The default HFS file system on Mac OS X is case insensitive, and an examination of the repository with a web browser showed the problem - there were two files that had the same name, but one had mixed case, and the other was lower case. When checking out the repository, both files are dropped into a temporary directory, but one overwrites the other. When SVN tries to move the temporary files, one of them no longer exists!
To prove the theory, I created a case-sensitive .dmg file with Disk Utility, and was able to check out the whole repository into that virtual disk without any errors. I’m considering whether I should convert my whole disk to case-sensitive mode, although some Google search results suggest that some applications don’t like that either!


