I know several of this blog’s readers use subversion (I tend(ed?) to recommend subversion recently). I hope this post may save you a couple of frustrating hours hunting for a vague data corruption problem.

Yesterday I wanted to add some images to my website, from a computer I don’t normaly work on. Therefore I made a fresh checkout. Before completing the checkout, subversion exited with:

svn: Checksum mismatch on rep '1v6': 

and the two checksums that might be off. I finally found the solution for subversion checksum mismatch in the subversion users mailing list.

Several other workarounds suggested removing the offending directory and trying update, but that didn’t work (not even on a working copy). If you follow the instructions , you may be left wondering how to find the checksum in the representations.dump file as I was. I tried searching for the checksum, but that didn’t go so well.

The ‘1v6’ from my error message indicates a node number or something. There’s only one in the file. And, as instructions” say, you really do need 16 repeats of \00, like so:

1v6
 ((fulltext 1 2 (md5 16 \00\00\00\00\00\00\00\00\00\00\00\00\00\00\00\00)) 3 1v6)

I tried replacing it with the same amount of slashes as were there in the first place, but that didn’t work.

For future reference, I had this problem with svn, version 1.2.0 (r14790) on windows and reproduced it on debian linux, and still had the problem with version 1.2.3 (r15833).

I like subversion for all its’ features, but in moments like this, I guess I’d prefer a version control system that uses the filesystem as-is. Probably my repository has been corrupted since revision 2 (out of 130 revisions…) as svn dump stopped when dumping this revision. Apparently, I’m using this repository write-only, and subversion doesn’t see anything wrong when one one only perfomrs commits.

In case you wonder, the file in question was fine, it was only the checksum in the database that was corrupted…