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If you just wish to browse around or download a few individual files, the best tool is the web-based ViewVC interface for Subversion or go straight to the public repository at http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/.

Many of the projects make snapshots of the source code available. These are simply tarballs containing the most up-to-date source code captured four times per day.

To access the Subversion repository anonymously, you will need a Subversion client. You can also browse for projects via http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/.

Choose the module you would like and check it out. For example, to get the Spamassassin module, use:

For more help on using Subversion, consult the Subversion website or Subversion book. The web site provides a list of clients and useful links (including a link to the Eclipse plug-in).

We currently use HTTPS basic authentication for logging in to Subversion (certificate info below). To change your password, visit https://svn.apache.org/change-password.

This will prompt you to enter a svn password of your choice. Pick a safe password! If you cannot login, or have lost your password, send an email to root@ to request a temporary subversion password.

Now, when you make changes, you can commit them with your username/password combination, i.e.

svn co https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/excalibur/trunk/ excalibur-trunk
cd excalibur-trunk
echo "test" > test.txt
svn add test.txt
svn commit --username your-name --password your-password \
  --message "Trying out svn"

svnserve is not supported, nor is svn+ssh.

Committers will need to properly configure their svn client. One particular issue is OS-specific line-endings for text files. When you add a new text file, especially when applying patches from Bugzilla, first ensure that the line-endings are appropriate for your system, then do ...

svn add test.txt
svn propset svn:eol-style native test.txt

Your svn client can be configured to do that automatically for some common file types. Add the contents of the file http://www.apache.org/dev/svn-eol-style.txt to your ~/.subversion/config file. [Note: for Windows this is normally found at C:\Documents and Settings\{username}\Application Data\Subversion\config]

Some files may need additional properties to be set, for example svn:executable=* should be applied to those script files (e.g. .bat, .cgi, .cmd, .sh) that are intended to be executed. Since not all such files are necessarily intended to be executed, the executable property should not be made an automatic default.

However, you should still pay attention to the messages from your svn client when you do 'svn commit'.

The server certificate for https://svn.apache.org/ is a real SSL certificate. However, Subversion, by default, does not currently ship with a list of trusted CAs. So, here's some information to help you verify the validity of our cert:

 Hostname: svn.apache.org
 Issuer: 07969287, http://certificates.godaddy.com/repository,
         GoDaddy.com, Inc., Scottsdale, Arizona, US
 Fingerprint: cc:54:a4:a9:ec:3a:9b:1c:23:ac:2d:57:c6:96:9f:5f:4a:1d:2d:86

If you're getting an error message like the following:

svn: PROPFIND of '/repos/asf/foobar':
Compressed stream invalid (https://svn.apache.org)

That's a known issue in the neon client library which has been fixed in neon 0.24.7. A workaround is to disable compression in your client. Edit ~/.subversion/servers. Uncomment the [global] section if neccessary, and add a line that reads

http-compression = no

And that should "fix" the problem until you can upgrade.

If you are using a date revision such as -r{2004-09-12}:{2004-08-12} and not getting any or all of the revisions you expected, this is a known problem specific to the ASF repository.

Unfortunately, there is nothing that can be done to improve this situation, so you must use a workaround. You can use svn log or ViewVC to locate the actual revision number that is first after the date you desire, and substitute that into your -r argument to the svn command.

For example, consider the desired command:

When this produces no output, running svn log alone shows:

So, the comand above should become:

The particular reason this occurs is because the order of the revisions is not identical to the order of dates in the repository. This is a side effect of loading CVS repositories with history with dates prior to the latest date in the Subversion repository.

Very rarely - please read this. Commits in subversion are transactional. This means that locks are almost always unnecessary.

An oft quoted use case is to prevent concurrent editing of a large unmergeable binary document. However, for open development, good communication is preferable to locking even in this use case. A good timely post to the list letting your fellow developers know that you're going to start editing that huge PDF is better than locking the file.

Hourly is fine. Please do not use programs that poll the repository more frequently than hourly. People who run automated scripts that continuously poll the repository wind up getting their access denied, which may impact other folks connecting through the same host. If you need to stay more in-sync than an hourly cron allows, subscribe your script to the relevant commit mailing list.