Umlaut problem in 8.5 RC 2 on OSX

Version 8.0.1 and some earlier versions of SmartSVN circumvent the well-known "umlaut bug" of svn in OSX, but 8.5 RC 2 apparently does not.    In  http://support.smartsvn.com/index.php?/SmartSVN/Knowledgebase/Article/View/401/55/problems-with-umlauts--in-filenames-on-mac-os-x  we learn that SmartSVN for OSX has additional code to solve the problem of special characters in file names.  But what about version 8.5?    More details:    Let's say we have a file "Änderungen.txt" in our repository. Checking out with SmartSVN 8.0.1 we get what we expect:    Änderungen.txt 23 Unchanged      Looking at this same file from the command line reveals the "umlaut bug":    svn status  ? A?\204?\136nderungen.txt  ! Änderungen.txt      And, similarly, now in SmartSVN 8.5 RC 2:    Änderungen.txt 23 Missing  Änderungen.txt 23 Unversioned      This seems to be a step back. It is just this feature, to be able to handle Umlauts in file names, what makes SmartSVN superior to the competition for me.

Last updated 6 years ago

Hi there,  Unfortunately this is a bug with Subversion itself, though it's due to be fixed in version 1.9 when that comes out - we'll be building a new version of SmartSVN for when that happens but until then it's not something we can fix.

>but until then it's not something we can fix.  Well, in SmartSVN 8.0 (and 7) your were at least able to hide or circumvent that bug such that one can work normally with those repositories.  It would be nice to have that in version 8.5, too. I have many of those repositories "spoiled" with special characters and 8.5 RC2 is completely unusable in those cases, no correct update, add, commit operations, but all those work well in 8.0.

The reason it's changed is because in the 8.5 RC's we've moved to using the JavaHL libraries which are the same ones used by Subversion - for many reasons, though predominantly because it's so much faster. That's why the issue has shown up again in this revision.  Apache are working on the 1.9 alpha now and according to the roadmap it's due out in Q2 of this year so it is underway, but given that you've a lot of files with special characters in you'll probably be better using SmartSVN 8 until the 1.9 release of Subversion is out.

> That's why the issue has shown up again in this revision.  OK, thanks for the explanation. And thanks also for the info about the upcoming fix. It's nearly unbelievable that this bug in svn is known since at least 2005 without a solution (except for SmartSVN's tricks).

i did test the commandline tools from subversion 1.9.0 alpha 2. this bug is still not fixed in the alpha 2 release.  but i found a patch for 1.8.* which fixes the problem  http://subversion.tigris.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=2464  i use the patched server+client on mac and everything works fine.    so, my question is: in which version of SmartSvn (or subversion) will this bug be fixed?    thanks

Hi, as I said above: "it's due to be fixed in version 1.9" - thanks for the information about the patch.  There's more information on our support site at http://support.wandisco.com/index.php?/Knowledgebase/Article/View/401/0/problems-with-umlauts--in-filenames-on-mac-os-x