SVN “generic failure”

Talk about weird errors:
$ svn up
svn: generic failure

Le what?!

Apparently, this can have multiple causes:

  • Hostname of your local machine not being resolved (try adding to hosts file of the SVN server)
  • Firewall issue(s)
  • Negotiation issues (try changing from “file://” to “svn+ssh://”)

The first issue (your computer does not know who it is) is actually a problem. Diagnose this by checking with “sudo echo hello world” — does sudo report “cannot resolve host ….”? If so, then the below will probably solve it:
echo "127.0.0.1\t`hostname`" >> /etc/hosts

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