[Gllug] Difference between svn: and svn+ssh: on the server

[John Winters]

Jose Luis Martinez wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 29, 2008 at 3:58 PM, John Winters <john at sinodun.org.uk> wrote:
>> I've just been trying to access an svn server using svn+ssh (because the
>> server is behind a firewall which doesn't allow pure svn traffic).  I
>> had difficulty accessing it so I tried again from inside the firewall
>> and got this (to me) surprising result:
>>
>> john at thecus:~$ svn list svn://svn.sinodun.org.uk/xronos
>> slicecode/
>> timetabler/
>> timetabler.2006/
>> timetabler.preIoW/
>> john at thecus:~$ svn list svn+ssh://svn.sinodun.org.uk/xronos
>> svn: No repository found in 'svn+ssh://svn.sinodun.org.uk/xronos'
>> john at thecus:~$
>>
>> Why does using an ssh tunnel mean I can no longer access the same
>> repository?
> 
> That will most likely have to do with ssh.
> 
> I am not familiar with svn (subversion?) but I would suggest to run
> the tunnel manually in your side with ssh debug enabled.
> 
> If you have control of the svn.sinodun.org.uk server, you could launch
> an ssh server  there in a different port with log enabled as well,
> that should throw some clues.

ssh access works fine, and the svn command succeeds in making the ssh
connection but then can't find its repositories.

I think I've found out a bit more.  It seems that when you use svn+ssh,
instead of connecting through an ssh tunnel to your existing svnserve
process, the ssh session invokes a new svnserve process.  I think the
problem is that this new process doesn't know where to find the
repository directory on the server.  The really weird thing is that
according to the man page the config file for svnserve goes *in* the
repository directory, so until it's found the repository directory it
can't access its config file which will tell it where to find the
repository directory...

I'm sure there's a trick to get around this, but I haven't found it yet.

Cheers,
John
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