Hacking svnkit-1.7.5 into Bamboo 4 to get Subversion 1.7 working copy

[Marc Belej]

We have an issue when updating Subversion 1.6 working copy where single file svn:external updates fail with error:
Update of {workingcopydll} has been skipped: svn: The file external from {repourldll] cannot overwrite the existing versioned item at {workingcopydll}

This is a Subversion bug affecting 1.6 working copy whether checked out by svnkit, subversion command line client or TortoiseSVN for example.
It is fixed in Subversion 1.7.

We have worked around it to date by having a clean check out on every build, but we're now bottlenecked in Bamboo by this workaround and can't scale to any more build plans.

Today I tested svnkit-1.7.5 and found that it is not affected by this problem as it uses Subversion 1.7 working copy. I attempted to integrate it into Bamboo by deleting svnkit-1.3.7.jar and extracting the following files to ../webapp/WEB-INF/lib/

• svnkit-1.7.5.jar
• sequence-library-1.0.2.jar
• antlr-runtime-3.4.jar
• sqljet-1.1.3.jar

However Bamboo would not check out Subversion working copy, even when I updated the Bamboo configuration to:
wrapper.java.additional.5=-Dbamboo.svn.wc.format=1.7

I have raised Bamboo Support Ticket and was advised to post here. Has anyone been able to hack svnkit-1.7.5 into Bamboo 4 or above to get Subversion 1.7 working copy?

[Marc Belej · Accepted solution]

This ticket is no longer relevant. Upgraded to Bamboo 4.2.1 in which Subversion 1.7 is supported.

[PiotrA]

Marc, do you have access to the bamboo sources? I think you would have to hack the SvnRepository.java, somewhere at lines 148-160. Bamboo's SvnRepository in 4.0.x didn't recognize the "bamboo.svn.wc.format=1.7" switch (check in your logs if you have "Unrecognized SVN WC format description specified: 1.7. Using defaults." message).

[Norman Abramovitz]

Are you sure your bamboo working copy is actually upgraded to 1.7 format? I can see you are making the request to use 1.7 format, but the upgrade command needs to be run on an existing working copy as well and that is usually done as a separate step.

[Marc Belej]

I'm not upgrading an existing working copy version from 1.6 to 1.7 at any stage. Currently I am having to clean checkout a 1.6 working copy every time to avoid the bug with svn:externals, but this is inefficient and I can't run as many build plans as I need to this way.
svnkit-1.7.5 can check out a v1.7 working copy and "svn update" it without throwing the error on svn:externals, however I can't find a way for Bambo 4.x to use svnkit-1.7.5 and check out a Subversion 1.7 working copy.