*OT* A weird wordlist.db problem

[Tom Eastman]

Matthias Andree wrote:

> Tom Eastman <tom at cs.otago.ac.nz> writes:
> 
>> Sorry for the rant, this is a few months after I switched all my
>> subversion repositories over to fsfs because a similar problem ate all
>> six of them.
> 
> I don't think so. Berkeley DB for subversion should only corrupt if
> 
> 1. you're running a broken (i. e. older) version,
> 
> 2. you're updating Berkeley DB without dumping the database before the
>    update and reloading it after the update.

The Case of the Eaten Subversion Repositories was a little less
mysterious... what happened was I (running gentoo) installed the new
version of subversion (just a standard version bump).  But for some reason,
when it compiled it linked to an *older* version of the berkeley db
libraries.  The older library had a complete freakout when it saw the newer
database format ("we don't need no steeenking forward compatibility...")
and broke down in tears.

Luckily, in this case I wasn't silly enough to upgrade svn without dumping
all the repositories first, so I was able to get back on my feet reasonably
quickly.  It was still enough for me to switch to the 'fsfs' format, and I
haven't looked back.

        Tom