mysociety.org - How great!

I've previously used WriteToThem.com to communicate my concerns on various government / EU policies. I didn't realise that the people behind that site also had a host of other initiatives. mysociety.org is a fabulous concept that shows what can be done by moderately organised people with a little bit of technology.

Enforced SVN upgrade

I migrated from Eclipse Europa (3.3) to Eclipse Ganymede (3.4), re-installed the necessary plugins and noticed an issue with using svn on the CLI.


$ svn up
svn: This client is too old to work with working copy '.'; please get a newer Subversion client

$ svn --version
svn, version 1.4.6 (r28521)
compiled Mar 11 2008, 08:26:35

Copyright (C) 2000-2007 CollabNet.
Subversion is open source software, see http://subversion.tigris.org/
This product includes software developed by CollabNet (http://www.Collab.Net/).

The following repository access (RA) modules are available:

* ra_dav : Module for accessing a repository via WebDAV (DeltaV) protocol.
- handles 'http' scheme
- handles 'https' scheme
* ra_svn : Module for accessing a repository using the svn network protocol.
- handles 'svn' scheme
* ra_local : Module for accessing a repository on local disk.
- handles 'file' scheme


Apparently, Subclipse had upgraded my working copies and my CLI client was too old to cope with this. The options appeared to be either upgrade to Ibex, build svn locally or use hardy-backports. Backports seemed like the best option and has a nice option to restrict what I want to install.

$ cat /etc/apt/preference
Package: *
Pin: release a=hardy-backports
Pin-Priority: 400

$ sudo aptitude install subversion=1.5.1dfsg1-1ubuntu2~hardy2
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Reading extended state information
Initialising package states... Done
Building tag database... Done
The following packages are BROKEN:
subversion
1 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 1274kB of archives. After unpacking 713kB will be used.
The following packages have unmet dependencies:
subversion: Depends: libsvn1 (= 1.5.1dfsg1-1ubuntu2~hardy2) but 1.4.6dfsg1-2ubuntu1 is installed.
Resolving dependencies...
The following actions will resolve these dependencies:

Upgrade the following packages:
libsvn1 [1.4.6dfsg1-2ubuntu1 (hardy, now) -> 1.5.1dfsg1-1ubuntu2~hardy2 (hardy-backports)]

Score is 20

Accept this solution? [Y/n/q/?] Y
The following packages will be upgraded:
libsvn1 subversion
2 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 1995kB of archives. After unpacking 971kB will be used.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n/?] Y
Writing extended state information... Done
Get:1 http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com hardy-backports/main subversion 1.5.1dfsg1-1ubuntu2~hardy2 [1274kB]
Get:2 http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com hardy-backports/main libsvn1 1.5.1dfsg1-1ubuntu2~hardy2 [721kB]
Fetched 1995kB in 27s (72.2kB/s)
(Reading database ... 169200 files and directories currently installed.)
Preparing to replace subversion 1.4.6dfsg1-2ubuntu1 (using .../subversion_1.5.1dfsg1-1ubuntu2~hardy2_i386.deb) ...
Unpacking replacement subversion ...
Preparing to replace libsvn1 1.4.6dfsg1-2ubuntu1 (using .../libsvn1_1.5.1dfsg1-1ubuntu2~hardy2_i386.deb) ...
Unpacking replacement libsvn1 ...
Setting up libsvn1 (1.5.1dfsg1-1ubuntu2~hardy2) ...

Setting up subversion (1.5.1dfsg1-1ubuntu2~hardy2) ...
Installing new version of config file /etc/bash_completion.d/subversion ...
Installing new version of config file /etc/subversion/config ...
Installing new version of config file /etc/subversion/servers ...
Processing triggers for libc6 ...
ldconfig deferred processing now taking place
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Reading extended state information
Initialising package states... Done
Building tag database... Done


Subversion upgrade - DONE!