The Quire

Obviously at Apple they not only like to Think Different, they also love to Brake Different and I found this to be especially true for standard UNIX configuration files: usually solving those problems involves anything from commenting out a line in a system file to manually compile a replacement for a core library, stuff that makes one regret the days spent (wasted?) trying to get a (bloody) bleeding edge KDE 4.0 pre-alpha build run on Ubuntu.

Since my MacBook Pro likes to keep me busy, it decided it was time for me to upgrade by screwing up my Snow Leopard install and force me to start from scratch with a fresh one, kind of the supernatural sign I was waiting for to finally upgrade to Lion. YAY!

I have to admit the installation went pretty smooth (I created a new HFS partition by resizing the only one the laptop came with and started the install process from a spare bootable Lion DVD I had at disposal) and being the touchscreen junky I am, I feel finally at home; but the joy and excitement of the newly gained magic touchpad gestures capabilities didn't last too long...

In fact it was enough to go back to work today and start a new week by checking out our trunk repository via svn+ssh to restore the status quo and rebalance the Karma:

loxbook$ svn+ssh://svn.wikia-code.com/svn/wikia/trunk svnserve: warning: cannot set LC_CTYPE locale svnserve: warning: environment variable LC_CTYPE is UTF-8 svnserve: warning: please check that your locale name is correc #Incredibly long and boring list of files At revision 46803. Killed by signal 15.

You'll probably notice two things from the above: svnserve is a xenophobe (it appears to dislike my locale name and be quite vocal about it) and the SVN process was killed by an anonymous "signal 15". Why, oh Why!

The cause is common: Apple thinks our configuration should be different than the standard. I'll save you the canonical Google search (which didn't help that much in the end) and present you a solution for both. Yes guys, this is a 2-for-the-price-of-1 deal! Grab one seat until there's one available!

Let's start from teaching svnserve to behave, all you need to do is edit your /etc/ssh_config and comment out the line with SendEnv LANG LC_*.

Easy, isn't it? Checkmark!

And now onto avoiding the SVN process from being brutally killed: on a normal UNIX system it would be enough to edit your ~/.profile (creating it if you didn't have one already) and add export SVN_SSH="ssh -q".

But of course once again we need to Think Different, so just open up ~/.subversion/config and search for the line with ssh = $SVN_SSH ssh -o ControlMaster=no; you simply need to add the -q parameter, your final result should be ssh = $SVN_SSH ssh -q -o ControlMaster=no.

Voila! A basic tool that was supposed to be working out of the box right after installing XCode is finally doing it right after a couple of random (I know what I'm doing, seriously!) changes to the system configuration.