Using svn on an unreliable internet connection

Question

I'm new to SVN, and I want to join the Apache OpenSource community, starting with the easy bugs.

Before that, I need to use SVN to fetch the source code, but my internet connection is erratic, and I keep getting errors like:

• "The server sent a truncated http response body"
• "Error retrieving report"

and so on.

I'm using SVN 1.8.1

I want to know how I can get the source code inspite of having an unreliable connection. Are there any commands specifically for an unreliable connection? Or is it just not (yet) possible for me to use svn with an unreliable one?

Answer 1

As far as I know, there aren't any commands that are connection-resilient. You could checkout the source code piecemeal, one folder at a time using sparse directories, but unfortunately you might still receive errors:

svn co the folder structure:

svn checkout http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/subversion/trunk --depth immediates

Then svn up each folder in turn:

svn up --set-depth infinity build
svn up --set-depth infinity contrib
etc.

And then set the depth of the parent folder to infinity so that subsequent updates retrieve changes for every folder, recursively:

svn up --set-depth infinity

A bit unwieldy, but it might reduce your frustrations with your unreliable internet connection.