Pragmatism in the real world

svn and case-insentive file systems

Another one to chalk up to a doh! moment…

I’m checking out my wife’s website to my new MacBook and get this error message:

svn: In directory ‘website/gallery/piccies’
svn: Can’t move source to dest
svn: Can’t move ‘website/gallery/piccies/.svn/tmp/prop-base/IMG_0013-thumb.jpg.svn-base’ to ‘website/gallery/piccies/.svn/prop-base/IMG_0013-thumb.jpg.svn-base’: No such file or directory

I’m pretty sure that there’s no problem with the subversion repository as I’ve been using it for months with no problem so I asked a friend to check it out on his Windows box… which failed with the same error. We thought at first that linux was allowing something illegal to occur which Windows and Macs weren’t. Then we thought about the other differences between Linux and Windows/Mac OS X.

After a while. It turns out that there are two files in the directory: IMG_0013.jpg and IMG_0013.JPG. One svn mv command later and the problem is solved.

It would have been nice to have had a better error message though!

4 thoughts on “svn and case-insentive file systems

  1. OS X also has a case-sensitive version of it's HFS file system. You just need to specify that you want the fs to be case sensitive when you create a new partition, or when you install OS X.

    Regards,

  2. I got the same problem and struggled for long time. Finally, google took me here and I got a solution.

    You saved my day. Thanks!!

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