How to upgrade SVN 1.4.4 (r25188) to SVN 1.6

Question

How do we upgrade our SVN from version 1.4.4 to version 1.6?

I thought we could use the following command line, but it does not exist in our version:

svnadmin upgrade

SVN is running on a Windows Server environment. We are running SVN Server version: svnadmin, version 1.4.4 (r25188) compiled 2007-06-08T18:49:42.

Answer 1

What kind of server are you using? If you're running apache(http://) or svnserve(svn://), just replace all the svn binaries with the 1.6.3 versions of the binaries (knee jerk nag - backup your repository first, keep the old binaries around). Don't forget to upgrade the apache modules if you're using apache.

If you're not using a server, but running against the files directy (c:\), just update your clients to use 1.6.3.

At this point, your new 1.6 server is serving out the 1.4 repository. To upgrade the repository structure and gain full access to the new features, use the svnadmin upgrade command that comes with the 1.6 binaries. Run this command on a machine that has access to the physical files of the repository and give it the physical location of the repository root (c:\myrepository).

You may get a more optimised repository structure if you dump out the contents with svnadmin dump, create new blank repository, svnadmin load the old dump. Read the release notes for 1.5 & 1.6 and the output of "svnadmin help upgrade" to find out why.

Your clients can upgrade separately, when they're ready. A 1.6 service can talk to a 1.4, 1.5 or 1.6 client, and a 1.6 client can talk to a 1.4 server, so it doesn't matter if you upgrade the clients first.

Unlike the repository, the working copies on your machines are upgraded as soon as a new client sees them. This means you will have trouble mixing clients of different versions on the same machine, so for example, if you use tortoisesvn and ankh svn - you'll need to update both clients to the 1.6 version at the same time. If you get working copy version errors, this will be why. It won't go away until you stop using the old clients.

As with all things subversion, the redbook is essential.