Off you go… into the purple yonder!

The SVN FAQ has an entry with the title why aren’t my repository hooks working?. It describes some debugging tips for svn hooks.

Unfortunately it does not mention a few very important SVN ‘features’:

1. stdout of all repository hooks goes to /dev/null, always
2. stderr of post-commit repository hooks goes to /dev/null, always
3. stderr of all but post-commit repository hooks goes to /dev/null unless the hook script returns with a non-zero exit code

I would argue that those are three glaring bugs, and I hope that they will be fixed soon. There is absolutely no reason for that output to be thrown away - at the very least it should be logged somewhere on the server. If people don’t want output for a specific script, they can always redirect it to /dev/null from the script itself.

In the mean time, I think that FAQ entry deserves an update…