After toying with the idea to use SVN (or possibly Git) I decided to try SVN and find a nice web interface that was easy to setup.

In comes WebSVN, which I thought would be easy to setup. Well I created the SVN repo following the instructions in the SVN book and had it up and running fine for my new server monitoring script.  Then I wanted to create a front-end to this repository (and for BlueBug once I made that one).

I looked at Chora but it was a bit more time than I wanted to spend on something simple, so I went with WebSVN. I uploaded the files, moved the distconfig.php to config.php and it looked as if it was working. After clicking on a repository I got a blank page.

Upon looking into the error log I found this lovely message:

[STDERR] XML error: no element found (3) at line 1 column 0 byte -1
cmd: svn --non-interactive --config-dir /tmp list --xml -r 1 'file:///home/bluescri/svn/mbm/'

Googling around a bit I found quite a few suggestions but none fixed the issue. For curiosities sake I did a svn --version and got

# svn --version
svn, version 1.1.4 (r13838)
   compiled Aug 21 2005, 20:56:55

apparently I was running an archaic version of SVN. Downloaded the latest version and installed it.

wget http://the.earth.li/pub/subversion/summersoft.fay.ar.us/pub/subversion/latest/rhel-4/i386/subversion-1.5.1-1.i386.rpm

wget http://the.earth.li/pub/subversion/summersoft.fay.ar.us/pub/subversion/latest/rhel-4/i386/neon-0.27.2-1.i386.rpm

wget http://the.earth.li/pub/subversion/summersoft.fay.ar.us/pub/subversion/latest/rhel-4/i386/neon-devel-0.27.2-1.i386.rpm

rpm -Uvh *.rpm

# svn --version
svn, version 1.5.1 (r32289)
   compiled Jul 25 2008, 00:38:53

Bingo, upgraded.

And voila, it worked! Awesome looking SVN repo front end.