Alex Rivera | Logout

Unable to commit to Subversion

Asked 2008-12-03T23:47:25.473
33

I have a client who had to rebuild his automated build server. He checked out his project folder from my subversion server but is now no longer able to commit - he gets this error:

Error: Commit failed (details follow):  
Error: Cannot write to the prototype revision file of transaction
'551-1' because a   
Error: previous representation is currently being written by another
process  
Finished!:

I have searched Google but although this error has been often reported there is no clear explanation - does anyone on StackOverflow have a solution?

UPDATE: Nobody else commits to that repository, so it was not a transaction stuck (at least not from another user). In the end we found that permissions were not set correctly. Not that you would know it from this message, but that fixed the problem.

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2 Answers

9

Your repository has a stuck transaction. You can use the svnadmin command to repair it. Like all the other svn utilities, svnadmin takes a command followed by options (usually just the repository directory). svnadmin has to be run on the server with the repository.

Do something like this:

svnadmin lstxns /path/to/repository

to get a list of transactions in process (you should see your offending 551-1 there). You can then decide how best to recover from this error... svnadmin also has a command rmtxns to delete the offending transaction. For more information, issue:

svnadmin help

or see the tigris website: http://subversion.tigris.org/. You can also get more detailed help on specific commands by following the help command with the name of the command you're interested in. For example:

svnadmin help lstxns

Obviously you will need shell access to the repository server and write permissions on the repository to use svnadmin. If you're repository format is Berkely DB you should suspend your svnserve daemon (if you use it) and any web_dav/web_svn access to ensure you don't corrupt the database while issuing svnadmin commands.

answered 2008-12-04T00:32:57.020
3

Had same problem, restarting apache fixed the issue.

answered 2010-01-19T16:57:44.470

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