September 23, 2009 – Jabbering Giraffe

Sometimes, it’s useful to see what subversion’s actually doing when talking to a server. There’s a neon-debug-mask option in ~/.subversion/servers. But what values can it take? They’re not documented in the subversion manual.

As always, the source is informative.

/* Debugging masks. */
#define NE_DBG_SOCKET (1<<0) /* raw socket */
#define NE_DBG_HTTP (1<<1) /* HTTP request/response handling */
#define NE_DBG_XML (1<<2) /* XML parser */
#define NE_DBG_HTTPAUTH (1<<3) /* HTTP authentication (hiding credentials) */
#define NE_DBG_HTTPPLAIN (1<<4) /* plaintext HTTP authentication */
#define NE_DBG_LOCKS (1<<5) /* WebDAV locking */
#define NE_DBG_XMLPARSE (1<<6) /* low-level XML parser */
#define NE_DBG_HTTPBODY (1<<7) /* HTTP response body blocks */
#define NE_DBG_SSL (1<<8) /* SSL/TLS */
#define NE_DBG_FLUSH (1<<30) /* always flush debugging */

Or if you’re not a C coder (or had to spent more than 3 seconds working it out like me):

1: raw socket
2: HTTP request/response handling
4: XML parser
8: HTTP authentication (hiding credentials)
16: plaintext HTTP authentication
32: WebDAV locking
64: low-level XML parser
128: HTTP response body blocks
256: SSL/TLS
1073741824: always flush debugging

These are summed to enable the features you want. So, if I want requests, responses and bodies, that’s 2+8+128, so I need this in ~/.subversion/servers:

[global]
neon-debug-mask = 138

Of course, interpreting the resulting output is up to you, but if you’re having difficulties, it may give you some clue what’s up. I can immediately see the large “log” command that git svn rebase is using for instance.