Update: it's been 4 months and I've experienced no subversion corruption. Moral: don't use cygwin's subversion client on windows; use the native win32 client instead.
Moral of the story: Switch to a better Source Control Management Tool. I have experienced issues in both Linux (both command line, rapid, and eclipse svn plugin subeclipse), cygwin (command line), and Win32 (native using only TortoiseSVN). I have experienced issues in all three. With only one lost day consider yourself lucky. SVN corruption is just a matter of time. I am curious on any issues experienced with subversion. These are issues I have experienced (believe me there are others): 1) SVN cannot manage it's own internal state use case: a) change a file locally and try to move it then check it in. <- will fail b) move a file locally, change it then check it in. <- will succeed 2) Merges of entire branch produce interesting results especially on mixed platform development Win32/Linux a) line ending diffrences and other white space cause files to show diffrences when there are none leaving the developer to manually merge files which are not different with Right Hand Side containing copy of Left Hand Side + same text as User copy. b) attempts to change the diff and diff3 commmands in .subversion/config with my own versions have met with limited results. 3) Developer has to periodically result to tar no svn directories (tarnosvn - a script I had to write explicitly for this purpose) directories when the tree cannot be checked out due to now missing directories on remote branch as though SVN cannot figure out that the user branch and remote branch contain directories that have been removed or deleted. This leaves user wanting cvs get-clean-copy command in svn or simply a better version control tool. use case: a) Developer A (identities changed to protect the innocent) moved or deletes a subtree (using subtree with in the tree so as not to confuse with branch of a repository) from the tree. b) Developer B all excited to check in new changes attempts to update current tree to head of integ only to find gobs of errors in directories that have been moved or deleted. Developer tries in vein to delete said directories and recursive calls to svn update and svn cleanup and finally results to taring up source code in tree, deleting tree, and getting clean copy. Merging commands are not intuitive: See http://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.0/ch04s04.html Why should I have to use the syntax: svn log --verbose --stop-on-copy \ http://svn.example.com/repos/calc/branches/my-calc-branch I am told by developers that this is perfectly legitimate and makes perfect since. Processes of convolution never "make sense" to me especially for common use cases. If I need to know the root of the branch that I have check out why not suport this with a syntax that is reasonable like: Instead of: svn merge -r 341:HEAD http://svn.example.com/repos/calc/branches/my-calc-branch Why not: svn merge -r ROOT:HEAD http://svn.example.com/repos/calc/branches/my-calc-branch Where ROOT is the root of my branch and SVN "figures out" r341 Some issues may be fixed in 1.5: Improvements to copy and move<http://subversion.tigris.org/svn_1.5_releasenotes.html#copy-move-improvements> Merge tracking (foundational)<http://subversion.tigris.org/svn_1.5_releasenotes.html#merge-tracking> "The Final Word on Merge Tracking"<http://svnbook.red-bean.com/nightly/en/svn.branchmerge.advanced.html#svn.branchmerge.advanced.finalword> Has any one investigated GIT. I think I am in the Linus on this.... "with basis that SVN is a better CVS... there is no where to go form there". Though I do not condone how he makes his point / his approach. The only way for SVN to be a better Configuration Management tool to to break it's ties with CVS, and in my opinion go distributed. Linus speaks to Google about GIT http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XpnKHJAok8 The major difference with GIT, Mercurial, and others is that they are distributed version control tools allowing multiple repositories. SVN and CVS are centralized. With GIT you can always commit your current changes locally without having to update from a central repository something that centralized version control tools do not provide. With SVN all H#}} can break lose when you update before a commit. Now people will say that this is what branching and merging is for in SVN and if it worked I would agree with them, but in my opinion it is sadly broken and I truly had high hope for this working. It is only when you wish to merge those changes back to the central repo with GIT that you pay the penalty of merging. With GIT you can commit locally and then commit remotely (thus making tarnosvn not necessary as you can always commit local changes locally). Your file system is not smattered with .svn or .cvs directories as it is all kept in the .git directory (top level 1 separate directory). There are other reasons, but I will digress. http://www.selenic.com/mercurial/wiki/ http://git.or.cz/ I know I will never find a perfect tool, I am just on a search for the one that is least hateful. -- Brian