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I run a Debian Linux server as a general workhorse: web, email, FTP and also as a server for the Subversion source control system. I recently upgraded the version of the server software to 1.5 (from 1.4) and ran into a puzzling error when importing a project into a new repository I’d created under the new version.

Running “Import…” from TortoiseSVN resulted in the following error:

Can't open activity db: APR does not understand this error code

What gives? The server was working perfectly well before the upgrade, so it had to be something to do with the new server software. Checking the logs for the https:// checkin revealed the following error sequence:

[error] [client xx.xx.xx.xx] Could not create activity /svn/wordpress/!svn/act/a4265168-57ec-f947-a7d4-9534dc3cdf5e.  [500, #0]
[error] [client xx.xx.xx.xx] could not open dbm files.  [500, #120002]
[error] [client xx.xx.xx.xx] Can't open activity db: APR does not understand this error code  [500, #120002]

The mention of “activity” hinted that this was WebDAV related. After some time searching around for others that had encountered this error, I was able to determine that the problem was that version 1.5 of the svnadmin create command doesn’t create a “dav” directory in the repository, unlike earlier versions. This directory is used when modifying the repository via WebDAV (ie: using the http:// or https:// protocol) and without it WebDAV will not work. The directory should be created at the time of the first check in (or so goes the theory) but, for some reason that I was unable to determine, it wasn’t being created on my system.

This problem only occurs in brand new repositories created by version 1.5 of svnadmin create. Furthermore, if the –pre-1.5-compatible command line option is given on creation, the problem does not occur.

The simple solution was to create the directory “by hand” myself, as follows:

svnadmin create newproject
mkdir newproject/dav

After this, imports and check ins worked as before.

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