SVNKit, OSX, WebDAV and a wagon of shit

Hello everyone,

I’m back writing on this abandoned blog telling you a sad story about unstable technologies and epic fails.

SVNKit is a marvelous library that lets you write programs which interact with Subversion repositories and working copies. If you’re Eclipse users you’re probably using it as connector in Subversive.

It’s a wonderful tool, I love it but the disaster I’m going to tell you about… well, will clearly show you that not all the glitter is gold.

Scenario:

- A WebDAV server
- Various OSX clients with Eclipse (and SVNKit of course) on board which mount a personal remote FS

The users easily connects to the webdav server, connects Eclipse workspace to the remote FS, work work work, and then commit. Work work work, and then commit. Work work work and then commit.

The big FAIL in this story is as follow:
The commit operation via SVNKit brought the  mounted unit in a strange state where whenever you save, the saved data never reach the WebDAV server. Everything looks good on the client, but the server does not get a single update. The only one understanding there’s something wrong is SVN that, if asked, tells you no resources have been modified since last commit, but of course you don’t keep checking over and over do you?
If you disconnect the unit at this point, all changes since last commit will be lost!

I’ve checked and double checked, ANY program based on SVNKit melts your mounted unit.

Using native Subversion solves the problem entirely, but how many tears did I cry for this? LOTS.

Hope this helps!

Ah, almost forgot: useless to say that on Linux and Windows worked like charm!