clients not supporting http?

[Jason Aubrey <au...@gmail.com>]

Hi All,

I recently set up svn over http for a project I'm involved with. One
user made the following complaints:

(1) Some svn clients do not support the http protocol.  This
is a common occurrence when a user builds svn from source.

Because the svn transport svn:// is the standard,
internal transport for svn, every svn client should
support it.

(2) When i attempted to download a single-file,
svn complained that the file name was not a directory
name and rejected the request.

Is this true, that "some svn clients do not support http"?  This seems
unlikely to me. And I found
no examples when I searched google. I believe this user is on a Solaris
machine.

Also, should he be having trouble downloading a single file?  I can address
this second issue
with him - I primarily wanted to get the list's input on the first question.

Thanks very much,

Jason Aubrey

Re: clients not supporting http?

[Daniel Shahaf <d....@daniel.shahaf.name>]

Jason Aubrey wrote on Thu, 8 Jul 2010 at 14:05 -0000:
> (2) When i attempted to download a single-file,
> svn complained that the file name was not a directory
> name and rejected the request.
> 

You can use 'svn cat' or 'svn export' or 'svn co --depth empty' to get a 
single file.

Next time please explain your problem in more details (ideally including 
shell session transcripts).

Re: clients not supporting http?

[Daniel Shahaf <d....@daniel.shahaf.name>]

Campbell Allan wrote on Thu, 8 Jul 2010 at 17:13 -0000:
> 
> On Thursday 08 Jul 2010, Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote:
> > On Thu, Jul 8, 2010 at 7:05 AM, Jason Aubrey <au...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > > Hi All,
> > >
> > > I recently set up svn over http for a project I'm involved with. One
> > > user made the following complaints:
> > >
> > > (1) Some svn clients do not support the http protocol.  This
> > > is a common occurrence when a user builds svn from source.
> >
> > Yup: if you don't have the HTTPD or Apache include files installed,
> > known as the "httpd-devel" package under RPM based Linux distributions
> > like RedHat and Fedora, you can't build the relevant software because
> > you lack the compilation tools. The "./configure" script detects this
> > and disables the relevant features.
> >
> 
> Are you certain about that? Neon or serf provide the client with http support 
> and are both in the subversion-deps source tarball. I'm fairly sure all the 
> machines I've compiled on have never had the httpd-devel like packages 
> installed (or in some cases any dev packages beyond the compiler). https 
> support can be tricky as this will require either the openssl dev package to 
> be installed or a local build handy.

httpd dev packages are ONLY required to build mod_dav_svn.  They are not
required unless you're going to run a server.

Re: clients not supporting http?

[Nico Kadel-Garcia <nk...@gmail.com>]

On Thu, Jul 8, 2010 at 10:13 AM, Campbell Allan
<ca...@sword-ciboodle.com> wrote:
>
> On Thursday 08 Jul 2010, Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote:
>> On Thu, Jul 8, 2010 at 7:05 AM, Jason Aubrey <au...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> > Hi All,
>> >
>> > I recently set up svn over http for a project I'm involved with. One
>> > user made the following complaints:
>> >
>> > (1) Some svn clients do not support the http protocol.  This
>> > is a common occurrence when a user builds svn from source.
>> >
>> > Because the svn transport svn:// is the standard,
>> > internal transport for svn, every svn client should
>> > support it.
>>
>> Yup: if you don't have the HTTPD or Apache include files installed,
>> known as the "httpd-devel" package under RPM based Linux distributions
>> like RedHat and Fedora, you can't build the relevant software because
>> you lack the compilation tools. The "./configure" script detects this
>> and disables the relevant features.
>>
>
> Are you certain about that? Neon or serf provide the client with http support
> and are both in the subversion-deps source tarball. I'm fairly sure all the
> machines I've compiled on have never had the httpd-devel like packages
> installed (or in some cases any dev packages beyond the compiler). https
> support can be tricky as this will require either the openssl dev package to
> be installed or a local build handy.

You seem to be correct. It's the neon *include* files, not merely the
libraries, that are needed to compile some of this behavior in
standard Fedora and RHEL setups. I've not tried it with serf.

As pointed out elsewhere, it's mod_dav_svn that needs httpd related
utilities. Mind you, picking and choosing bits to leave out of a
Subversion setup is like picking the wrench you won't need in your
toolbox. If you're squeezed for space, leave one out, but it's
inevitably the one you didn't bring that you turn out to need....

Re: clients not supporting http?

[Campbell Allan <ca...@sword-ciboodle.com>]

On Thursday 08 Jul 2010, Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 8, 2010 at 7:05 AM, Jason Aubrey <au...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > Hi All,
> >
> > I recently set up svn over http for a project I'm involved with. One
> > user made the following complaints:
> >
> > (1) Some svn clients do not support the http protocol.  This
> > is a common occurrence when a user builds svn from source.
> >
> > Because the svn transport svn:// is the standard,
> > internal transport for svn, every svn client should
> > support it.
>
> Yup: if you don't have the HTTPD or Apache include files installed,
> known as the "httpd-devel" package under RPM based Linux distributions
> like RedHat and Fedora, you can't build the relevant software because
> you lack the compilation tools. The "./configure" script detects this
> and disables the relevant features.
>

Are you certain about that? Neon or serf provide the client with http support 
and are both in the subversion-deps source tarball. I'm fairly sure all the 
machines I've compiled on have never had the httpd-devel like packages 
installed (or in some cases any dev packages beyond the compiler). https 
support can be tricky as this will require either the openssl dev package to 
be installed or a local build handy.

I had to ask a friend, it seems on opensolaris it's a pretty ancient version 
of subversion provided in the packages (1.4ish) so it sounds like the user in 
question might have compiled his/her own.

> > (2) When i attempted to download a single-file,
> > svn complained that the file name was not a directory
> > name and rejected the request.
>
> You can't "check out" a single file, You can download it with the
> "export" command, or a simple "wget".
>
> > Is this true, that "some svn clients do not support http"?  This seems
> > unlikely to me. And I found
> > no examples when I searched google. I believe this user is on a Solaris
> > machine.
> >
> > Also, should he be having trouble downloading a single file?  I can
> > address this second issue
> > with him - I primarily wanted to get the list's input on the first
> > question.
> >
> > Thanks very much,
> >
> > Jason Aubrey
>
> He's probably trying to check it out, not download it. Checkouts
> create that ".svn" subdirectory, with its attached information about
> the other contents of the directory.

Campbell
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Re: clients not supporting http?

[Nico Kadel-Garcia <nk...@gmail.com>]

On Thu, Jul 8, 2010 at 7:05 AM, Jason Aubrey <au...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> I recently set up svn over http for a project I'm involved with. One
> user made the following complaints:
>
> (1) Some svn clients do not support the http protocol.  This
> is a common occurrence when a user builds svn from source.
>
> Because the svn transport svn:// is the standard,
> internal transport for svn, every svn client should
> support it.

Yup: if you don't have the HTTPD or Apache include files installed,
known as the "httpd-devel" package under RPM based Linux distributions
like RedHat and Fedora, you can't build the relevant software because
you lack the compilation tools. The "./configure" script detects this
and disables the relevant features.


> (2) When i attempted to download a single-file,
> svn complained that the file name was not a directory
> name and rejected the request.

You can't "check out" a single file, You can download it with the
"export" command, or a simple "wget".

> Is this true, that "some svn clients do not support http"?  This seems
> unlikely to me. And I found
> no examples when I searched google. I believe this user is on a Solaris
> machine.
>
> Also, should he be having trouble downloading a single file?  I can address
> this second issue
> with him - I primarily wanted to get the list's input on the first question.
>
> Thanks very much,
>
> Jason Aubrey
>

He's probably trying to check it out, not download it. Checkouts
create that ".svn" subdirectory, with its attached information about
the other contents of the directory.

Re: clients not supporting http?

[Mark Phippard <ma...@gmail.com>]

On Thu, Jul 8, 2010 at 7:05 AM, Jason Aubrey <au...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Is this true, that "some svn clients do not support http"?  This seems
> unlikely to me. And I found
> no examples when I searched google. I believe this user is on a Solaris
> machine.

Subversion requires either the Neon or Serf libraries to provide HTTP
support.  If you do not build with these libraries then you do not
have HTTP client support.  I would not say this is common as almost
all Subversion repositories are available only by HTTP.

Your user should either compile their Subversion client with all of
the proper dependencies or download a binary version.  There are a
number of places where you can get precompiled versions of Subversion
for Solaris.

http://subversion.apache.org/packages.html#solaris


-- 
Thanks

Mark Phippard
http://markphip.blogspot.com/

Re: clients not supporting http?

[David Weintraub <qa...@gmail.com>]

On Thu, Jul 8, 2010 at 6:05 AM, Jason Aubrey <au...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> I recently set up svn over http for a project I'm involved with. One
> user made the following complaints:
>
> (1) Some svn clients do not support the http protocol.  This
> is a common occurrence when a user builds svn from source.

Yes and no. Almost every binary available supports the HTTP protocol.
I would even go so far as to say they all do, but somewhere is an
obscure client (maybe for some Thuderbird Basic OS system) that
doesn't.

A much more likely occurrence is that someone builds their own binary
and doesn't have the neon and APR libraries needed for building with
the HTTP protocol. That binary would not support HTTP. However, you
can get pre-build binaries for almost every single OS you can name.
There should be no reason why a developer needs to build their own.

Your developer can go to http://www.sunfreeware.com to get a
Subversion client that uses the HTTP protocol for his Solaris machine.

> (2) When i attempted to download a single-file,
> svn complained that the file name was not a directory
> name and rejected the request.

Subversion only allows you to check out directories. You can use the
"svn cat" command to get single files, but if you're doing a checkout,
you need to checkout a directory.

NOTE: You can use the --depth=empty switch to checkout a directory
with no files in it, then do an "svn update <fileName>" to get the
single file you want. I discourage developers from doing this because
what they're doing is making a change without any testing. That is a
no-no.

-- 
David Weintraub
qazwart@gmail.com