Mike Nichols - Son of Nun Technology

Subversion Quick Tip - Expected format '3' of repository; found format '5'

I needed to place two new projects under svn version control and while i was working on it I thought i would go in an clean up some old garbage since when i first setup svn here was the first time I had ever even worked with it. Now one year later I am much more comfortable with it and am resetting everything up.

This included updating to SVN 1.4.4 and also choosing the fsfs file system setup instead of Berkeley.

I was able to get things going with subversion but my Apache 2.0 web server wasn't able to access it. I thought maybe I was supposed to use Apache 2.2, but that isn't it. So i dug into the error log in the Program Files/Apache/logs directory and saw this error:

(20014)Error string not specified yet: Expected format '3' of repository; found format '5'

It was obvious that this either a versioning issue between Apache and SVN or maybe because I am using the new file system type. Either way, I finally found this forum posting that helped me fix it. I needed to update the Apache modules from the new Subversion installation.

  1. Go into the C:\Program Files\Subversion\bin directory and grab the two *.so Apache modules
    1. mod_authz_svn.so
    2. mod_dav_svn.so
  2. Replace the same modules in the C:\Program Files\Apache Group\Apache2\modules directory with these two
  3. Place hair back on head.

Mike