Hello,

Yesterday I installed a BitNami stack which includes Redmine 0.8.5 and Subversion 1.6.2 and I ran into the same problem. I already had a stack with Redmine 0.8.2 which ran fine against a different Subversion (on a different machine), so I first checked the log. Redmine found my Subversion repository and ran into the same parsing error:

_Processing RepositoriesController#edit (for 10.0.0.21 at 2009-10-09 11:49:52) [POST]
Session ID: 6e214a0ba626f05646c679b9f4bbe4ff
Parameters: {"repository"=>{"url"=>"svn://xxxx-subversion1:3690/Infrastructuur", "password"=>"[FILTERED]", "login"=>"xxxx"}, "commit"=>"Create", "action"=>"edit", "id"=>"infrastucture", "controller"=>"repositories", "repository_scm"=>"Subversion"}
Completed in 0.04832 (20 reqs/sec) | Rendering: 0.02585 (53%) | DB: 0.00648 (13%) | 200 OK

_Processing RepositoriesController#show (for 10.0.0.21 at 2009-10-09 12:10:36) [GET]
Session ID: 6e214a0ba626f05646c679b9f4bbe4ff
Parameters: {"action"=>"show", "id"=>"infrastucture", "controller"=>"repositories"}
Error parsing svn output: #<REXML::ParseException: No close tag for /lists/list>
/home/xxxx/redmine-0.8.5-0/ruby/lib/ruby/1.8/rexml/parsers/treeparser.rb

Today, after no change, surprise: everything is OK! This means imho that the parsing error is actually a timeout; appearantly it has not read all info. Indeed, I was setting up a Redmine project but the Subversion project created contained very little, so I never anticipated in running into a long parsing process which could screw up.

• the Redmine and Subversion are running on the same PC running Ubuntu and nothing else is being done there.
• the Subversion used was installed inside the installation directory for Redmine; I used the BitNami stack without modification, except I added a repository path in some script where svnserve is called.
• I verified proper access and working of Subversion server using a client on another machine, using the same URL to access, i.e. svn://etc

I'm in the same problem here.

My Redmine worked pretty well util I upgrade SVN to 1.6. Initially it stopped to grab reviews from my repo. Searching on the web I discovered that cause of the problem and workaround that disabling the interactivity of my SVN client. At this time (few months ago) I'd not tested the diff view.

Now I discovered that the diff view (nor the SVN Resource views) is not working any more, with the same error above.

Processing RepositoriesController#show (for 201.51.219.6 at 2009-10-10 21:01:00) [GET]
  Session ID: c2c839b2b3b88a57c6f34c857d95f395
  Parameters: {"action"=>"show", "id"=>"ctx-cec", "controller"=>"repositories"}
Error parsing svn output: #<REXML::ParseException: No close tag for /lists/list>
/usr/lib/ruby/1.8/rexml/parsers/treeparser.rb:28:in `parse'
/usr/lib/ruby/1.8/rexml/document.rb:227:in `build'
/usr/lib/ruby/1.8/rexml/document.rb:43:in `initialize'
/usr/redmine/lib/redmine/scm/adapters/subversion_adapter.rb:85:in `new'
...

Any ideas?
How could I help to solve that?

Subversion version is not the problem. I run the tests with svn 1.6.3.

• can you use a Subversion client like RapidSVN or Tortoise to access the repository?
• does your Redmine project use exactly the same svn URL and user credentials?

This way, you rule out that it is subversion. I noticed that the subversion which is included in the BitNami stack uses a script to launch the svnserve to listen to some port but without specification of the repository. The BitNami subversion stack however, does use the same script but it does specify the path of the repository. This prevented me to use RapidSVN to access some svn URL when the 'new' subversion was up.

I still don't understand why appearantly it was a timeout problem on an initial connection; I was creating a new Subversion repository as well as a new Redmine, but that must have been the problem because it suddenly ran perfectly the next morning.

Hi all,

I solved my problem!

First time I had problems with SVN 1.6, I found a blog with some instructions of how to solve those problems. But I made a mistake and edited the SVN config only of the user root (and my mongrel cluster is running with user apache). That's the reason why my Redmine could get the revisons (by cron task, user root) but couldn't show diffs and resources (in the webapp, user apache).

After discover that, I edited my /var/www/.subversion/config (where /var/www is the home dir of user 'apache') the way blog says and Redmine is showing diffs and resources pretty well now.

The uncommented lines were:

store-passwords = no
store-auth-creds = no

Jean,

Some of problems related with SVN integration could be caused by this SVN default behaviour change. Is there a way to force Redmine to use non-interactive commands?

Hi, I just went through quite a hassle to get Redmine working with svn+ssh. I kept getting a 500 Internal Server Error, checking the log I discovered a problem like the one on this ticket, with a "No close tag for /lists/list" message, nevertheless it didn't make any sense to me.

I was running Redmine behind Apache, according to the instructions here: http://www.redmine.org/wiki/redmine/HowTo_configure_Apache_to_run_Redmine. The problem with this was I couldn't see what was going on, so I switched to running it from the redmine dir using "ruby script/server -e production". Then I was able to see the problem was Redmine needed an additional password and it was asking for it on the console. Since of course I didn't want to or could enter the password each time, I did the following:

• Edited lib/redmine/scm/adapters/subversion_adapter.rb line 228 and removed the "--no-auth-cache" option
• Edited /etc/passwd to enable a shell for apache
• Gave write permission to apache on /var/www (it's home dir according to /etc/passwd)
• Checked out my svn project so subversion would cache the password
• Set up password-less ssh login on the svn server with a public key for user apache (followed these instructions: http://blogs.translucentcode.org/mick/archives/000230.html)
• Tested the password-less ssh login
• Edited /etc/passwd to disable the shell for apache

Then everything worked fine. Now I'm having another problem with yum and some package dependencies to install mod_fastcgi, but that's another story. Hope this helps.

Sorry, I missed a few steps on the instructions... (you need to be root to start with, and at one point you need to do some stuff as the apache user, at least on CentOS)

• As root
• Edited lib/redmine/scm/adapters/subversion_adapter.rb line 228 and removed the "--no-auth-cache" option
• Edited /etc/passwd to enable a shell for apache
• Gave write permission to apache on /var/www (it's home dir according to /etc/passwd)
• Changed user to apache using the su command (su apache)
• Checked out my svn project so subversion would cache the password
• Set up password-less ssh login on the svn server with a public key for user apache (followed these instructions: http://blogs.translucentcode.org/mick/archives/000230.html)
• Tested the password-less ssh login
• Switched back to root (logged out of the apache shell)
• Edited /etc/passwd to disable the shell for apache

Sorry, forgot some steps for the instructions:

• As root
• Edited lib/redmine/scm/adapters/subversion_adapter.rb line 228 and removed the "--no-auth-cache" option
• Edited /etc/passwd to enable a shell for apache
• Gave write permission to apache on /var/www (it's home dir according to /etc/passwd)
• Changed user to apache using the su command (su apache)
• Checked out my svn project in /var/www just so subversion would cache the password
• Set up password-less ssh login on the svn server with a public key for user apache (followed these instructions: http://blogs.translucentcode.org/mick/archives/000230.html)
• Tested the password-less ssh login
• Switched back to root (logged out of the apache shell)
• Edited /etc/passwd to disable the shell for apache
• Deleted the checked-out project in /var/www

It's working for me, no need to manually configure svn as I said on http://www.redmine.org/issues/3929#note-5 when I upgraded redmine to 0.9.3.
Thanks!

I'm having this issue with 0.9.4.devel.3731 while trying to set up automatic repository creation. Repositories that work with my other redmine instance (same version) aren't working either in the Repository Creation WS-enabled server.

I am also having this problem:
redmine-0.9.3
subversion-1.6.9

Maybe this is a red herring but...

When I run 'svn list -xml' via CLI, there is a long pause in the output exactly at the place where redmine reports the error. Is it possible that the REXML parser is terminating it's input due to some kind of time out?

Everard Brown wrote:

I am also having this problem:
redmine-0.9.3
subversion-1.6.9

Maybe this is a red herring but...

When I run 'svn list -xml' via CLI, there is a long pause in the output exactly at the place where redmine reports the error. Is it possible that the REXML parser is terminating it's input due to some kind of time out?

It was indeed a red-herring. I switched from mongrel back to WEBrick and it is working again now - if I find out what's up with my mongrel setup I'll report back.

I'm having the same problem with:

• Redmine trunk from the git mirror on 4/26/2010
• Ruby 1.8.7
• Subversion 1.6.9
• WEBrick server (Apache acts as a gateway)
• file:/// urls on the same server.

It's only for a single, private project. There is no delay when running the svn command manually. The returned xml from the manual run is well formed, according to Oxygen XML Author.

The problem persists with or without a username and password.

Crap...

When running the command manually as the redmine user...

[root@collab redmine]# su redmine -c "svn list --xml 'file:///mnt/infomaster/svn/website-technical/'@HEAD \
   --username xxxx --password xxxx --no-auth-cache --non-interactive" 
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<lists>
<list
   path="file:///mnt/infomaster/svn/website-technical">
svn: Unable to open an ra_local session to URL
svn: Unable to open repository 'file:///mnt/infomaster/svn/website-technical'
svn: Can't open file '/mnt/infomaster/svn/website-technical/format': Permission denied

It matters who you run it as...

I can understand the permissions problem, but I don't understand why it impacts only this one repository...Permissions seem to be identical...

Bryce Nordgren wrote:

The problem persists with or without a username and password.

When running the command manually as the redmine user...

[...]

It matters who you run it as...

I can understand the permissions problem, but I don't understand why it impacts only this one repository...Permissions seem to be identical…

svn file:// doesn't give a crap about users and passwords, it accesses the repository directly and is governed only by file permissions, in other words: you can either ditch them or change the transport/protocol you use to access your repository. Next, your problem is that repo_dir/format has permissions that don't allow the redmine user to open it, probably because you have committed to that repository as root. chown -R the whole repository to something the redmine user can read an write to and you should be good.

I finally got back to this.

My problem is that redmine runs as the redmine user and apache runs as a different user. My repositories are created with reposman.rb, using the owner for apache. reposman.rb only sets world readable permissions for public projects. Worse, even if you change the username and permissions for your repositories so that redmine can see them, reposman.rb will undo your fixes the next time it runs.

I ended up editing reposman.rb to always set world readable permissions on repositories. There are no users on this server, so access to the repo is always through Apache and/or the Redmine app.

Well, you could just run reposman as the same user redmine runs as.

I was running into this same problem and here's what I ended up doing to resolve it...

As mentioned up above, there were issues with SVN interactivity, added this to ~/.subversion/config:

[auth]
store-passwords = no
store-auth-creds = no

Which did not solve the problem, what did solve it was found at this link:
http://www.question-defense.com/2009/03/20/setting-up-redmine-svn-repositories-timing-out-when-attempting-to-view

$ ruby script/runner "Repository.fetch_changesets" -e production

I ran this after setting up my SVN repository information and it worked like a charm. My SVN environment is somewhat unique with > 100000 commits and a large number of projects jumbled together.

Running svn list --xml manually would give me proper output, however in the production log there was evidence it was never seeing a closed tag, indicating that the request timed out. Given that the timeout on the 'repository' tab pane is pretty quick, I'm not entirely surprised...

In lieu of creating a new issue, leaving my solution here for someone else who stumbles upon it.

Made a new issue regarding this problematic error. #6312

I found that that parse exception can be caused by permission issues. See #6327.

Sergey Kolodyazhnyy wrote:

Hi,
I still have XML parsing error:

Did you try this issue notes?
Did you try "svn info" and "svn ls" as apache passenger user(uid).

Closing this as I can't really see a problem anymore. If anyone still experiences similar problems, please open a new issue and link back to this one, it's become really hard to get any useful info from the conversation here.

Sorry, I missed it

Did you try this issue notes?

yes

Did you try "svn info" and "svn ls" as apache passenger user(uid).

yes, it's work

I have opened new issue: #8823