After a routine "apt-get upgrade" of Debian testing, I found myself unable to use my Subversion repository. I got an error message when trying to commit a file:

svn: Berkeley DB error while opening environment for filesystem db:
DB_VERSION_MISMATCH: Database environment version mismatch
svn: bdb: Program version 4.3 doesn't match environment version

A note from the Subversion FAQ had this to say:

After upgrading to Berkeley DB 4.3, I'm seeing repository errors.

Normally one can simply run svnadmin recover to upgrade a Berkeley DB repository in-place. However, due to a bug in the way this command invokes the db_recover() API, this won't work correctly when upgrading from BDB 4.0/4.1/4.2 to BDB 4.3.

Use this procedure to upgrade your repository in-place to BDB 4.3:

• Make sure no process is accessing the repository (stop Apache, svnserve, restrict access via file://, svnlook, svnadmin, etc.)
• Using an older svnadmin binary (that is, linked to an older BerkeleyDB):
  1. Recover the repository: 'svnadmin recover /path/to/repository'
  2. Make a backup of the repository.
  3. Delete all unused log files. You can see them by running 'svnadmin list-unused-dblogs /path/to/repeository'
  4. Delete the shared-memory files. These are files in the repository's db/ directory, of the form __db.00*

The repository is now usable by Berkeley DB 4.3.

As the instructions note, you need a copy of subversion linked with a pre-4.3 version of the Berkeley database library. Subversion uses Berkeley via the APR Library. So we need to install appropriate verions of Berkeley, APR and Subversion.

My notes are below. Note that I installed the APR and Subversion software into a local directory (/home/mk/proj/svn_db/local in my case). Also, my Subversion repository is in /data/svnroot.

# export LD_CONFIG_PATH=/home/mk/proj/svn_db/local

# wget 'http://downloads.sleepycat.com/db-4.2.52.tar.gz'
# tar -xvzf db-4.2.52.tar.gz
# cd db-4.2.52
# cd build_unix
# ../dist/configure
# make
# make install

# wget 'http://archive.apache.org/dist/apr/apr-0.9.5.tar.gz'
# tar -xvzf apr-0.9.5.tar.gz
# cd apr-0.9.5
# ./configure --prefix=/home/mk/proj/svn_db/local
# make
# make install

# wget 'http://archive.apache.org/dist/apr/apr-util-0.9.5.tar.gz'
# tar -xvzf apr-util-0.9.5.tar.gz
# cd apr-util-0.9.5
# ./configure --prefix=/home/mk/proj/svn_db/local --with-apr=/home/mk/proj/svn_db/local --with-berkeley-db=/usr/local/BerkeleyDB.4.2/

# make
# make install

# wget 'http://subversion.tigris.org/downloads/subversion-1.2.3.tar.bz2'
# tar -xvjf subversion-1.2.3.tar.bz2
# cd subversion-1.2.3
# ./configure --prefix=/home/mk/proj/svn_db/local --with-apr=/home/mk/proj/svn_db/local --with-berkeley-db=/usr/local/BerkeleyDB.4.2/
# make
# make install

# su
# /home/mk/proj/svn_db/local/bin/svnadmin recover /data/svnroot
# tar -cvf ~/svnroot_backup.tar /data/svnroot

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