Subversion: SVN E160043. Expected FS format between '1' and '4

Question

I am following the instructions on this blog to setup subversion on my development PC: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2008/04/setting-up-subversion-on-windows.html.

I get an error when I get to the following line in the blog: "Congratulations! You just checked your first change into source control! " i.e. instead of saying "congratulations.....", it says: SVN E160043. Expected FS format between '1' and '4'. Found format 6. I have spent some considerable time Googling this but I have not found an answer.

I am running subversion on a Windows 7 64 bit PC. I have disabled the Windows firewall and ZoneAlarm.

Answer 1

If you want to create backwards-compatible repositories from v1.8, you can use the --compatible-version flag. example:

svnadmin create --compatible-version 1.6 PATHNAME

http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/subversion/trunk/subversion/libsvn_fs_fs/structure has a list showing which FS formats are compatible with different versions of svn. But you should just check the versions of svn on the machines that you are going to use, and make your repo compatible with the oldest version.

Answer 2

This was down to a version conflict. I have Tortoise version 1.8 installed on my PC and I was downloading version 1.6 of Subversion from here. The answer was to download version 1.8 of Subversion here.

Answer 3

I found an easy solution that worked for me on Windows 7:

Go to your repository folder, find a sub-folder 'db' and open a file 'format' in a text editor. Change the number on the top from 6 to 4, save and close.

Problem solved!

UPDATE: @Bondolin reported that this solution does not work for versions 8 to 7 versions of SVN. See his comment below. I have not tried it as I had no need.

Answer 4

Try to use --pre-1.6-compatible flag to create repository compatible with Subversion versions earlier than 1.6. For example:

svnadmin create --pre-1.6-compatible PATHNAME