Upgrading v1.7 to v1.9

The SVN server on our system is version 1.7.4. It is running fine. We are running centos-release-6-8.el6.centos.12.3.x86_64 The Repos add to around 1.3Gb.  We are having commit failures with no errors from a version 1.9x remote server used by a new developer, so we are looking to upgrade to 1.9  What is the safest way to do the upgrade and what gotchas should we look out for?  Thanks for any help you can give.

Last updated 6 years ago

It probably is time to upgrade. You may want to consider loading up a new machine with CentOS 7 and gaining the benefits of Apache 2.4 and a ton of bug fixes and enhancements. I'll assume that you don't want to do that but it would be worth it as it will preclude some other issues and provides a solid path for years to come.  Anyway, If you're using any Subversion/Python integration, then you're going to need to get Python 2.7 installed since Subversion 1.9 requires Python 2.7 (no longer supporting Python 2.6).  Other than that, it's a pretty easy install - especially if you get the prepackaged bits from WANdisco.  The next question is whether or not you want to get "all the performance" from SVN 1.9 that you can (see the SVN 1.9 release notes https://subversion.apache.org/docs/release-notes/1.9.html#fsfs-improvements). If so then you're going to want to dump/load your repos into the new repository format. If you don't care then simply "svnadmin upgrade". If you do care, then after you've dumped and loaded remember that you need to copy over the hooks for each repository. Apache/svnserve should be "down" during the cutover.