SVN Error: Expected fs format between '1' and '3'; found format '4'

Question

Here's what I did, I have installed svnserve as a service and I started it with the net start svn service command. I typed svn ls svn://localhost to test the service but it returned the error as stated in the title of this post.

I entered svn --version and svnserve --version on my computer to find out the version numbers and the client and the server version is the same, version 1.5.6. I'm guessing the error appears due to different versions of the server and the client.

When I start the server using svnserve --daemon --root command in cmd, The error still appears.

Why does the error appear? Thanks

Solution 1

Which Subverson tool did you use to create the repository? TortoiseSVN? Your TortoiseSVN may be newer, a 1.6.x release, then your 1.5 command line client and svnserve, so svnserve 1.5.x cannot serve a 1.6.x repository.

In my fsfs repository created with svnadmin 1.6.1, the db/format file contains

$ cat repos/db/format 
4
layout sharded 1000

Solution 2

I have the same problem but I had resolve it with a different approach

The issue mainly is the db/format file where it expects a "2" best way to check is to ope the file

$ vi db/format 

If you get this

4
layout sharded 1000

Then you should change them to say

2

Its better to also check you current file

$ vi db/current

It you get only this (e.g. 0 meaning reviosion number 0)

0

Then you should change them to just say (e.g. 0 meaning revision number append "nx" and also "2" )

0 nx 2

Finally Check also if your directory structure for the revs and revprops is sharded or looks something like this

db/revs/0/0

change it to a non folder structure

db/revs/0

Note: the revision file (e.g. 0) is just inside the revs directory, no more other folder should be there

Same goes with revprops change

db/revprops/0/0

to

db/revprops/0

Solution 3

I installed (the Collabnet install of) SVN 1.5.5 and it was running fine with TortoiseSVN 1.6.1. After upgrading SVN to 1.6.2 I'm getting the same error (Expected fs format between ‘1’ and ‘3’; found format ‘4’) when I try to access it through Trac. This lends credibility to Blair's answer. I'll let you know how I get it running again.

Update: Blair's answer worked for me, too: the message says that an old version of SVN is trying to access the repository, so find it and delete it. The specifics for me were that the error only occurred when I used Trac, so I re-installed Trac on Windows (http://trac.edgewall.org/wiki/TracOnWindows) with the latest installer I could find (svn-python-1.6.1.win32-py2.5.exe) and deleted old eggs from the Python site-packages folder. After a reboot and resync, I was up and running again.

Solution 4

The latest version of Zend Studio (8.x) has an SVN tool which gives the same error about finding format 4, but expecting format 1-3. I had created my repository using CollabNet SVN (about a year ago) and was unable to open the repository from within Zend Studio.

I think the best solution (at least for my case where I want to work with Zend Studio and not fight with it) is to recreate your repository with the old version of SVN. The URL for SVN 1.3 for Windows is:

http://subversion.tigris.org/files/documents/15/32856/svn-1.3.2-setup.exe

After installing this, make sure you are executing the svnadmin.exe and svn.exe in the newly installed version 1.3 directory in case you have already installed CollabNet SVN (which has a default install directory of c:/csvn).

View more solutions

Comments

[Jarvis]

I installed my Subversion by extracting binaries. To uninstall it, do I just delete the folders where I extracted it? I'm going to install Collabnet

[Shane Grant]

This is exactly the issue I had. Thanks.