SMB file sharing doesn’t support Subversion on Mac OS X

I’ve received several queries about the SMB patch that I mentioned in my [svn-on-osx][] post. Unfortunately, when I went hunting for the patch the second time around, I wasn’t able to find it. But I *was* finally able to solve my OSX/Subversion/scplugin problems by using the `svn+ssh` transport, thus:

svn+ssh://username@some.server/path/to/repository

Once I gave up on SMB file sharing, I’ve had no trouble with [scplugin][] or [Subversion][] on Mac OS X.

[svn-on-osx]: http://sonicchicken.net/blog/wordpress/2006/04/04/svn-on-osx/
[scplugin]: http://sonicchicken.net/blog/wordpress/tags/scplugin “Posts on this blog tagged with ‘scplugin'”
[Subversion]: http://sonicchicken.net/blog/wordpress/tags/subversion “Posts on this blog tagged with ‘subversion'”

About Jim Vanderveen

I'm a bit of a Renaissance man, with far too many hobbies for my free time! But more important than any hobby is my family. My proudest accomplishment has been raising some great kids! And somehow convincing my wife to put up with me since 1988. ;)
This entry was posted in Mac OS X, Uncategorized and tagged , , . Bookmark the permalink.

7 Responses to SMB file sharing doesn’t support Subversion on Mac OS X

  1. jim says:

    Thanks, Jason! That’s not the one I was looking for, but it did lead me to the missing patch!

    The reference you gave has a link to the svn darwin flock patch by Brian Wells. The page I was looking for was this post on the Subversion Users list.

    According to Brian’s post, under Mac OS X 10.4 it sounds like both the zero byte write patch as well as the svn darwin flock patch are required for SMBFS “local” repositories to work.

    If this works for you, would you mind posting a follow-up? TIA!

  2. Jason says:

    Thanks! I’ll let you know if we try it out.

  3. Jason says:

    I applied both patches to the latest version of svn, compiled and installed. I’m still get the same input/output errors as before… no go

  4. Brian Wells says:

    I’ve combined both the file locking patch and the zero byte write patch into a single patch for APR, since this is the portability library Subversion relies on. You can read more about it here: http://web.mac.com/brianwells/iWeb/main/Blog/91699255-5FDD-4E2F-B05C-84EC49055CEE.html

    Please let me know if you have any problems getting it to work for you.

    – Brian Wells

  5. Ron Stewart says:

    I have SVN 1.4.0 (d/l’d from codemonkeys) installed on my MacOS box (10.4.8), have mounted my SMB volume that contains my repos, and issued an “svn co” command to checkout a copy of one of my projects. Works great! I am now looking at Finder integration and everything I have found points me to SCPlugin. In looking at SCPlugin on tigris, it looks way old. Is it really going to work?

    Thanks much for any help you might offer!

  6. jim says:

    Ron, be sure to test “commit” before assuming that Subversion is playing nice with SMB. “svn co” worked for me also, but checkout doesn’t do any file locking.

    The SCPlugin code is old, but it works fine. Be sure to look over the SCPlugin posts for potential pitfalls.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *