Brian Meloche's Blog I'll blog about ColdFusion, weight loss, podcasting and life with too many pets! :-)

This post falls into the category of "self-reminders".

Several months back, I ran into an issue with a corrupt Subversion log entry while trying to update the comments in a log. I found this post then on what the problem was, and how to fix it:

svn: malformed file recovery

Back up for a minute... Why corrupt? How would that happen in the first place?

OK... let's say you post a comment when doing a commit, and you realize after committing that your comment was pertaining to the wrong fix, or you didn't make a comment and needed to, or did but you left something off. You can try to do this through your SVN GUI or maybe command line, but I've seen times where that change didn't work. You try to go into the repository manually, and you find where the logs are located, you find the revision and comment, change it, and... voila! Corrupt! You do a sanity check and discover that manual edit was the cause of the corruption. So, now what?

Let's take you through just that. Learn from my mistake!

Simply put, finding the revision comment in the log is easy enough to fix, assuming you have access to where the repository is stored (as opposed to access to the repository). Just go into your actual repository. You should find a "db" folder, then a revprops folder, and then a 0 folder and finally a file for the revision you want to change. On Windows, you should have something like this:

C:\{where my repositories are stored}\{repo name}\db\revprops\0\{revision number}

Assuming your comment hasn't been changed yet (it won't matter below), open that file, and you'll find the comment at line 12 that you want to change and change it.

Thought that was easy? Nope, not quite. Save the file, and then try to browse your repository log. You should now get a malformed file error message. If you had this before, you're probably snickering, as you're no farther ahead.

Now, go back to that revision number file that contains the log comment. See line 11? That should say V, then a space, and finally a number. That number is significant. That represents the number of characters in line 12. Count the number of characters on line 12 and replace the number on line 11. Save the file and try browsing the log again... problem fixed.

I thought this mental reminder would help others as much or more as it'll help me!