svn vs. HFS+ on GNU/Linux

I run Ubuntu and Mac OS X on a MacBook Pro as my main machine. I do most development work on Ubuntu and most emailing, calendaring, etc. on Mac OS X. But sometimes I want access to my source code in Mac OS X to do quick little fixes and the like. So I made a case-sensitive HFS+ partition that is mounted read/write in both Ubuntu and Mac OS X. Ubuntu can’t handle the HFS+ journalling yet, and HFS+ without journaling seems to explode every once in a while, so I didn’t want to mount my Mac OS X system read/write on Ubuntu, hence the separate partition.

It works quite well, especially when working with git, since the folder is the repo. With svn, its a bit of a different story. It mostly works, but there are some cases where SVN freaks out. If I do svn update in a folder, it all works fine. If I do svn update Makefile, i.e. only directly updating a file, I get:


hans@palatschinken externals $ svn up Makefile
svn: Can't open file 'Makefile/.svn/entries': Permission denied


Apparently this is a known issue to the SVN devs, but they don’t want to fix it: Re: svn diff issue: svn confuses files with dirs on hfsplus?