Archive for August 11th, 2010

How to solve errors during subversion repository check out svn (Error: URL Error: of existing directory Error: expected URL does not match)

Wednesday, August 11th, 2010

A colleague of mine tried recently to use tortoise because his previous work station (a Mac Book notebook) has a problem with his charging device.
Therefore he is right now forced to use Windows as tortoisesvn is among one of the best if not the best option of a subversion client for the Windows platform naturally he decided to install tortoise and to download one of the subversion repositories stored on our development server.

Till now all went fine for him as he conctacted me in Skype to report he cannot check out from the repo, because his check out operation has suddenly froze up with a message:

Added: C:UsersmyuserapplicationconfigsMygeneral.php Error: URL ‘svn+ssh://someuser@192.168.0.1/var/svn-repos/your_repository/trunk/application/configs/Mine’ Error: of existing directory ‘C:Usersmyuserapplicationconfigsmine’ does not match Error: expected URL

This of course is a very raw version of the error and it wasn’t really gave us any clue on what might be causing the desired svn check out.

After a bit research in Google, a lot of testing and many try catches we got what was causing the check out failures on his Windows XP.

The whole issues were caused by the fact that Windows’s FAT16, FAT32 file system is case insensitive.
On that account when tortoise tried to download and save two directories one called Mine and the other called mine under thesame folder hood in windows it failed, since already Mine directory was present and existing.

It later appeared that the mine directory contained some old garbage which doesn’t have to deal with out source application stored inthe repository so we completely decided to remove it.

However the issues caused and the 30 minutes lost in tracking the issues are a lot of lost time for nothing …
So just to close this post if you get error like:


Added: C:UsersmyuserapplicationconfigsMygeneral.php Error: URL
'svn+ssh://someuser@192.168.0.1/var/svn-
repos/your_repository/trunk/application/configs/Mine' Error: of existing
directory 'C:Usersmyuserapplicationconfigsmine' does not
match Error: expected URL

Be sure to check the files content of your svn repository for duplicate directories with case sensitiveness.

I’m not sure if it’s Windows file case insenstive file system (for not implementing case sensitivity by now), subversion repository software running on the server or the tortoise client fault but I’m sure this is rather ridiculous and needs a soon and timely fix by someone of the three mentioned ones.