Hi,
for a long time, a company I am working with now has set up new repositories using a “template” repository, which is a folder on the server with a “configured but empty” repository, that was just copied over and over to the SVN server's directory with a new folder name every time a new repository was created. This resulted in lots of repositories having the same UUID as the template.
I intend to quick fix that by calling "svnadmin setuuid" after copying the template, for future repositories.
But what to do about the existing ones? What are the implications of duplicate UUIDs on a server?
For context, we’re talking about some thousand repositories used by some thousand different users. Since on the WC side there is no option to tell “svn relocate” to accept a new UUID, after changing the UUID of a repo, all WCs would break and users would need to check out thousands of repos again. So that’s a big “con” on the list of pros and cons to do anything about the UUIDs. Furthermore, it has been like this for years, and apparently there were no obvious issues so far that they related to the duplicate UUIDs. So the perceived urgency to do something about it is quite low.
But I do not assume the UUID is completely irrelevant within the server, is it? So I’d like to understand what the UUID is used for (besides making sure repository and WC belong together), so we can better understand the “pro” side making them all unique would have.
E.g. does it improve performance, does it reduce load because of less hash collisions in a cache file, does it prevent obscure errors we might have seen but not realized it was related to the UUID duplicates, etc.?
Thank you very much,
Christoph
