Did GitHub shut down its support for Subversion clients?

Question

GitHub documents to support Subversion clients and I'm using that for many projects to include them in one of my working copies using svn:externals. Since yesterday I get the following error for all of those projects:

The server at '[...]' does not support the HTTP/DAV protocol.

This happens to a long list of projects, some examples:

https://github.com/apache/commons-lang.git/tags/LANG_3_6
https://github.com/pgjdbc/pgjdbc.git/tags/REL42.2.2
https://github.com/ams-tschoening/kaitai_struct_tests.git/branches/libs_java_3rd_usage

I've already written to the support but didn't get any response yet. Maybe someone here knows already if this is a temporary issue only or permanent? Maybe this problem doesn't happen for other users at all for some reason?

Thanks!

user_10600771 · Answer

Does not work here anymore with ALL github repositories! Using latest TortoiseSVN 1.11.0.

I've tried with version 1.10 of TortoiseSVN which still works, so this looks like a problem with TortoiseSVN 1.11 (which is linked against SVN 1.11).

user_761095 · Answer

This particular problem has been resolved on GitHub's side (as of 19 Dec 2018), please, see the Outdated section below.

However, you can get the error The server at '[...]' does not support the HTTP/DAV protocol. in other cases such as

You navigate to SVN web interface URL instead of repository URL. Read the article KB102: Subversion client errors caused by inappropriate repository URL.
You can receive this simply when you navigate to a URL that does not belong to a Subversion repository. Here is an example where we run svn info against https://stackoverflow.com/:

svn info https://stackoverflow.com/ svn: E170013: Unable to connect to a repository at URL 'https://stackoverflow.com' svn: E175003: The server at 'https://stackoverflow.com' does not support the HTTP/DAV protocol

Outdated:

Use Subversion 1.10 clients as a workaround.

Because of some changes in the latest Subversion 1.11.0 release, the newest SVN 1.11 clients do not work with GitHub's SVN bridge anymore and produce an error. Let's hope for a bugfix on SVN or GitHub's side soon.

You can find more information in this users@ Apache Subversion mailing list thread: https://lists.apache.org/thread.html/90c028421ac86f787c2101ab61a70ec5fa0a6f4d617a8b87be802e5c@%3Cusers.subversion.apache.org%3E

user_7665067 · Answer

No, it is just a bug on GitHub side.

Check out the below... (I found this messages from the link uploaded by bahrep)

The root cause is that GitHub does not implement Subversion's HTTP/DAV protocol correctly.

In 1.11, the Subversion client has become stricter about the server requirements (see: https://svn.apache.org/r1825302). Specifically, we require that the server sends DAV response headers to the OPTIONS request, which we use for capability negotiation. Here's an example of a correct response:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK Date: Sun, 04 Nov 2018 15:40:24 GMT Server: Apache/2.4.7 (Ubuntu) DAV: 1,2 DAV: version-control,checkout,working-resource DAV: merge,baseline,activity,version-controlled-collection DAV: http://subversion.tigris.org/xmlns/dav/svn/depth ...

The GitHub server does not return any DAV: header for the OPTIONS request, so the response is considered incorrect. I suggest sending a bug report to GitHub; the attached script can be used to simulate Subversion's OPTIONS request.

In the meantime, staying with 1.10.x appears to be the only option if you have to use GitHub's SVN protocol.

Did GitHub shut down its support for Subversion clients?

3 Answers