Question

I’ve heard in the past that it’s unsafe to share a Subversion working copy between OS.

E.g.:

1. copy a working copy from a Windows machine to a Linux machine, and use the Linux build of SVN on it.
2. On a Windows machine, access/manipulate an SVN working copy with both Windows binaries and CygWin binaries of SVN. (I might want to do this to use this solution for example).

But I haven’t heard definitively whether it could cause corruption of the .svn data. It is true that EOL issues could be a problem if svn:eol-style is set to native.

What’s the current status of this issue? Has it changed in more recent releases of SVN? Is it safe provided certain precautions are taken (e.g. not checking out/updating files with svn:eol-style=native on both platforms)?

Answer 1

I’ve used svn on a shared network directory between unix, linux, solaris, and windows; anecdotally the only problem I ran into is that different svn client versions are ‘incompatable’. The linux and unix machines were equiped with a version of svn older then the solaris svn; which was in turn older then the windows machine client. The result is that running ‘svn up’ updates the metadata files to whatever client is running; and the client won’t access files with a more recent metadata version. Final end result being that svn clients should be kept at the same version number.

So, yes, I’ve been able to move a working directory around between machines with minimal loss of life. That said, I’ve never used any svn options beyond what was default.