Subversion: SVN E160043. Expected FS format between '1' and '4

Question

I am following the instructions on this blog to setup subversion on my development PC: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2008/04/setting-up-subversion-on-windows.html.

I get an error when I get to the following line in the blog: "Congratulations! You just checked your first change into source control! " i.e. instead of saying "congratulations.....", it says: SVN E160043. Expected FS format between '1' and '4'. Found format 6. I have spent some considerable time Googling this but I have not found an answer.

I am running subversion on a Windows 7 64 bit PC. I have disabled the Windows firewall and ZoneAlarm.

Entwistle

Are you tied to SVN specifically or is there a chance to choose something else? – Forefront

@zerkms, I am evaluating a few source control solutions. I am not tied to subversion. I am going to look at GIT as well. – Entwistle

Answer 1

This was down to a version conflict. I have Tortoise version 1.8 installed on my PC and I was downloading version 1.6 of Subversion from here. The answer was to download version 1.8 of Subversion here.

Entwistle

This worked for me. Install tortoise svnclient 1.8 and install any svn server such as collabnet 1.8. – Alopecia

Answer 2

If you want to create backwards-compatible repositories from v1.8, you can use the --compatible-version flag. example:

svnadmin create --compatible-version 1.6 PATHNAME

http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/subversion/trunk/subversion/libsvn_fs_fs/structure has a list showing which FS formats are compatible with different versions of svn. But you should just check the versions of svn on the machines that you are going to use, and make your repo compatible with the oldest version.

Chloe

Answer 3

I found an easy solution that worked for me on Windows 7:

Go to your repository folder, find a sub-folder 'db' and open a file 'format' in a text editor. Change the number on the top from 6 to 4, save and close.

Problem solved!

UPDATE: @Bondolin reported that this solution does not work for versions 8 to 7 versions of SVN. See his comment below. I have not tried it as I had no need.

Kristine

Serhii, I agree this is not the most elegant way to solve it but it's a working solution. So far nobody reported any issue. Do you know of anybody whose repo became corrupt this way or is this purely hypothetical? – Kristine

It's more like hypothetical, however, chances seem to be relatively high. – Canescent

The format is thoroughly documented: svn.apache.org/repos/asf/subversion/trunk/subversion/… And, as far as I saw, FSFS formats are not "forward-compatible", i.e. client expecting format will not know what to do with feature(s) from format 6. You can find the 'changelog' of the formats by searching for "Filesystem formats" string – Canescent

This seems like it could cause severe consequences if the repository was written in one format but the format descriptor was edited to another format. Does anyone have more information about whether editing the format descriptor could ever be recommended? – Reminiscence

Answer 4

Try to use --pre-1.6-compatible flag to create repository compatible with Subversion versions earlier than 1.6. For example:

svnadmin create --pre-1.6-compatible PATHNAME

Linear

Answer 5

I was receiving this same issue. I had an OLD version of svn installed and a NEWER version installed. The Windows PATH environment variable had the OLD version path before it had the NEW version path. This came from using UBERSVN and the later installing VisualSVN. I didn't uninstall the UBERSVN version which was 1.7.9. When I created the repositories, I used the VisualSVN tool, which used the newer version of SVN. 1.8.x. When I then used the DOS command prompt with svnadmin hotcopy, it would look at the PATH variable directories and was using the OLDER version on the NEWER created files and gave the SVN E160043. Expected FS format between '1' and '4'. Found format 6. Hope this helps.

Dramshop

Great! Had an older copy of SVN - UberSVN – Dozen

Answer 6

This may or may not be relevant - I had similar problems when I was trying to use the 'Open from Version Control...' feature within the Delphi IDE with Delphi Xe5 & now Xe6. Here's how I fixed it in both.

Step 1:

• Update the 32bit version of SVN
  Download the latest version is (or that matches your stuff) at the time of the posting of this reply it's "Subversion 1.8.8 (Windows 32-bit)" from http://www.collab.net/downloads/subversion
  Note: Even if you are using TortoiseSVN 64 bit you still have to install/update the 32 bit version because Delphi's IDE is still only 32 bit.

For Delphi Xe5

• Copy updated files from:
  C:\Program Files (x86)\CollabNet\Subversion Client
  to
  C:\Program Files (x86)\Embarcadero\RAD Studio\12.0\bin\subversion

For Delphi Xe6

• Copy updated files from:
  C:\Program Files (x86)\CollabNet\Subversion Client
  to
  C:\Program Files (x86)\Embarcadero\Studio\14.0\bin\subversion

Note:

• the Delphi folders listed above are the default folders (at least how they installed on my system) so your paths may be different.

• 2 of the SVN files (MSVCP100.DLL and MSVCR100.DLL) the C++ runtimes were newer in my Delphi folders, so probably don't want to overwrite them.

• and of course don't have Delphi running when you are updating the files.

Polysynthetic