Subversion's lost its Choices

Hi everyone,

I just tried to use the “svn” command-line utility for the first time since updating from OS 5.28 to 5.30 and it seems to be failing to read its choices. I’ve always had my authentication details saved, but now it’s prompting me for a username and password every time I do something.

I renamed the /subversion directory in Choices and tried again, expecting it to make a new one, but it didn’t. I’ve verified through *Show that Choices$Dir and Choices$Write are set correctly, and the svn client itself “thinks” it’s looking in the right place: when I enter my password it gives a message with the path to the “servers” file in SCSI::HardDisc4.$.!BOOT.Choices/.subversion/servers (it’s obviously using Unix notation in the message, but it confirms that it knows where the Choices directory is).

Are there any other Subversion users here and have any of you run into the same issue? I’m running version 1.6.12, which reports itself as compiled on 2011-03-08 but I’m sure that’s not correct as I remember needing to update it for Armv8/SWP (I suspect it’s reporting the date the original Unix version was released).

This is the current subversion on PackMan.

*svn --version
svn, version 1.6.23 (r1485506)
   compiled Oct 19 2021, 21:23:06

Here, on first run it writes its ‘choices’ to UnixHome.

There appears to be support for RISC OS Select? Choices in the app but it does not do anything.

SCSI::HardDisc4.$.!BOOT.Choices/.subversion/servers (it’s obviously using Unix notation in the message, but it confirms that it knows where the Choices directory is).

That path should be,

/SCSI::HardDisc4.$/!BOOT/Choices/.subversion/servers

I think what’s happening is Choices is getting expanded to a RISC OS path which is then appended with a unix path.
I think it’s the same problem as this,

https://www.riscosopen.org/forum/forums/11/topics/18752#posts-142651

I think it’s the same problem as this

Well done. I can confirm that the problem goes away after replacing SetChoices with the version from DesktopBoot 1.30. I’ll have a further play later but now we’re on the right track.

Thanks :)

This is the current subversion on PackMan.

I wonder why it’s not showing me any updates. Something to investigate later.

I’ll have a further play later but now we’re on the right track.

Yep, it does indeed seem to be because Choices is now an absolute path instead of simply Boot:Choices.

I wonder why it’s not showing me any updates. Something to investigate later.

It was a very simple reason: I was not using a PackMan-managed copy of Subversion. That’s because the version in there doesn’t have the “ra_neon” module (svn --version will show a list of installed modules), whereas the one I got from somewhere else does. In any case the one from PackMan exhibits the same behaviour on my machine.