Question

This one has me scratching my head.

I’m running Subversion 1.3.1 (r19032) on Ubuntu. All was well until recently when I tried to run svnadmin verify prior to a dump. This is the error message:

svnadmin: Invalid diff stream: insn 0 cannot be decoded

I have looked around for an explanation and fix but can’t seem to find one. Subversion experts, I need your help.

Answer 1

I had this same error with svnadmin 1.5 awhile back after renaming files and directories. Specifically I renamed some files from ‘Filename’ to ‘filename’ and SVN pretended it was okay with this… only to freak out later when I tried doing a fresh checkout. When I tried a fresh checkout I got a weird abort message about the files not existing.

So this naturally led to me doing a svnadmin dump, followed by svnadmin verify only to get the same message that you specified.

I don’t know of a fix. I worked around this problem like so:

1. Dumped the next previous version of the repository and ran svnadmin verify on the dump.
2. If error still occurs goto step 1.
3. After verifying a good dump, I deleted the entire SVN repository, recreated it, and imported from the good dump file.

Make sure your dump file has all deltas so you get the change history up to the last good point.

I lost a bit of code, but not too much to be really painful.