Posted on by Marcus Bointon

Subversion 1.7 to 1.6 downgrade with MacPorts

MacPorts told me that there had been a subversion update (1.7.1), which I went ahead and installed. Woo! Huge speed improvements for everything I tried with the CLI client, great stuff. A short time later my IDE (PHPStorm) fell over screaming. It doesn’t like 1.7 yet, and it’s a bit stuck until SVNKit supports it. I should have checked really.

So how to downgrade? Fortunately this post makes it very easy. So I just did:

sudo port deactivate subversion @1.7.0_1
sudo port activate subversion @1.6.17_1

But now I’m stuck with a working copy in 1.7 format with uncommitted changes, and there is no tool to convert it back to 1.6 format. This is easily worked around; check out a new working copy (using svn 1.6) and sync across the changes, ignoring the .svn folders, like this:


rsync -av --update --exclude=".svn/***" ~/Sites/myproject1.7/ ~/Sites/myproject1.6

All happy now.

6 Replies to “Subversion 1.7 to 1.6 downgrade with MacPorts”

  1. You can also use the -C flag in place of the –exclude=”.svn”. It does the same thing. Don’t listen to the manual when it says CVS, it means both.

    From man rsync

    -C, --cvs-exclude           auto-ignore files in the same way CVS does

    rsync -avC --update ~/Sites/myproject1.7/ ~/Sites/myproject1.6

  2. This does not work for me. No matter what I do port insists on installing subversion 1.7. For example,

    sudo port install subversion @1.6.17_1
    —> Computing dependencies for subversion
    —> Activating subversion @1.7.4_0
    —> Cleaning subversion

    And after a port -f uninstall,

    > sudo port install subversion @1.6.17_1
    —> Computing dependencies for subversion
    —> Fetching archive for subversion
    —> Attempting to fetch subversion-1.7.4_0.darwin_10.x86_64.tgz from http://packages.macports.org/subversion
    …

    I am stuck because my svn server is a Fedora 16 Linux machine, and subversion 1.6 is the last version supported by Fedora 16.

  4. Pingback: How to downgrade Subversion client from 1.8 to 1.7 in MacPorts - Blogs - Permeance Technologies

  5. I’m experiencing the same problem as Julius.
    When I write:
    sudo port install subversion @1.6.20
    it ends up installing and activating subversion @1.8.5_1.

  6. Pingback: How to downgrade Subversion client from 1.8 to 1.7 on Mac OS X using MacPorts - Home - Permeance

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