Repository Administration
The only real argument against FSFS is its relative immaturity compared to Berkeley DB. Unlike Berkeley DB, which has years of history, its own dedicated development team and, now, Oracle's mighty name attached to it, 6 FSFS is a much newer bit of engineering. Prior to Subversion 1.4, it was still shaking out some pretty serious data integrity bugs which, while only triggered in very rare cases, nonetheless did occur. That said, FSFS has quickly become the back-end of choice for some of the largest public and private Subversion repositories, and promises a lower barrier to entry for Subversion across the board.
Creating and Configuring Your Repository In the section called “Strategies for Repository Deployment”, we looked at some of the important decisions that should be made before creating and configuring your Subversion repository. Now, we finally get to get our hands dirty! In this section, we'll see how to actually create a Subversion repository and configure it to perform custom actions when special repository events occur.
Creating the Repository Subversion repository creation is an incredibly simple task. The svnadmin utility that comes with Subversion provides a subcommand (create) for doing just that. $ svnadmin create /path/to/repos This creates a new repository in the directory /path/to/repos, and with the default filesystem data store. Prior to Subversion 1.2, the default was to use Berkeley DB; the default is now FSFS. You can explicitly choose the filesystem type using the --fs-type argument, which accepts as a parameter either fsfs or bdb. $ # Create an FSFS-backed repository $ svnadmin create --fs-type fsfs /path/to/repos $
# Create a Berkeley-DB-backed repository $ svnadmin create --fs-type bdb /path/to/repos $ After running this simple command, you have a Subversion repository. The path argument to svnadmin is just a regular filesystem path and not a URL like the svn client program uses when referring to repositories. Both svnadmin and svnlook are considered server-side utilities—they are used on the machine where the repository resides to examine or modify aspects of the repository, and are in fact unable to perform tasks across a network. A common mistake made by Subversion newcomers is trying to pass URLs (even “local” file:// ones) to these two programs.
6
Oracle bought Sleepycat and its flagship software, Berkeley DB, on Valentine's Day in 2006.
113