Subversion end-of-line style

In my work with the Liberty Alliance, I'm the editor for several documents in the upcoming Advanced Client specification set. We use subversion as our source code revision control system.

Recently, when I was working on a new draft of the specs and committing a set of files that included a number of Visio drawings and the equivalent Encapsulated Postscript file images, I ran into problems. After all the files were uploaded during the commit, which failed with the error message:

svn: File "xxx.vsd" has inconsistent newlines svn: Inconsistent line ending style

A quick look at the file and I saw that the files had the typical windows line terminator CRLF rather than the UNIX typical LF. So I hand edited the file removing the CRs and tried the commit again. The same thing happened just with the next file in the list. So clearly this was going to go on for each file. So I did what any other UNIX weenie would do -- entered a one line shell script for loop on the command line using tr to delete the CRs in each file.

This got me past the problem and the commit succeeded. However, I was not totally satisfied as I wasn't sure that if they could be edited in Visio with these changes. So I dug a bit deeper into the problem looking into Subversion.

It turned out that subversion has attributes on files, one of which is "svn:eol-style". In this case, the files I was working with had gotten this attribute set to "native" which on the UNIX system I was on would be "LF". Not good for a file from Visio. I thought about changing the svn:eol-style to CRLF which would get around my specific problem at this time (until Visio changed their file format), but the better solution ended up being to just delete this attribute on the file with the following command:

svn propdel svn:eol-style *.vsd *.eps

Then I copied in the files from my Windows partition (where they still had the CRLFs) and committed the files without a problem.

Tags : subversion / visio