Upgrade Subversion Server from 1.7 to 1.8

Question

Related to How to upgrade SVN server from 1.6 to 1.7 and Will TortoiseSVN 1.7 work properly against a SVN 1.6 repository?.

Updated VisualSVN-Server to 2.6.0 (SVN 1.8) and local TortoiseSVN clients to 1.8. I've upgraded local working copies to 1.8.

My question is simply is there anything to do to the actual repository? How can you determine the repository version? Can/Does it need to be upgraded?

I can easily update the working copy, but I can't seem to find anything that mentions the actual server repository.

Digitalize

Answer 1

It's not mandatory that you do anything on the server to upgrade your repository. To take advantage of new features in the FSFS backend going forward, you can run svnadmin upgrade but to get the full benefit for your whole history, you'll need to perform a dump/load cycle.

That said, there is a bug with svnadmin upgrade in 1.8.0 which results in a crash if you have an unsharded repository. So you may want to wait until 1.8.1, or do the full dump/load.

Dialogist

How can I tell if I have an "unsharded" repository? Otherwise, this looks like the answer I was missing. svnadmin. Move repo to repo1.7 > create new repo > svnadmin dump repo1.7 > dumpfile > svnadmin load repo < dumpfile. Little terse, but manageable for the handful of repositories we have. – Digitalize

If in your repository's db/revs directory you see a series of sequentially-numbered directories (starting with 0), each containing 1000 files, you have a sharded repository. If you just have a pile of files directly under revs, then it's unsharded. – Dialogist

Answer 2

According to the Apache Subversion 1.8 Release Notes, you just install the newest libraries and binaries on top of the older ones.

I'd have a good backup of Subversion 1.7 before I tried this.

Uprush

Answer 3

How can you determine the repository version?

look at {repo}/db/fs-type and {repo}/db/format. Mine is currently:

4
layout sharded 1000

Can/Does it need to be upgraded?

It doesn't have to be upgraded; svn 1.8 supports FSFS format 4, as well as some earlier formats. Dumping and reloading will give you the newest FSFS format (5), with some efficiency advantages, and presumably put off the day when you are forced to upgrade.

I believe the gains are greatest when there are a lot of small commits; on two repos I control I found repo size to be reduced by only about 5-10% going from FSFS 4 to FSFS 5.

Olomouc