WebSVN throws XML error: no element found (3) after upgrading to SVN 1.8.8

Question

We were on SVN 1.6.11 and just upgraded to 1.8.8 today. We can check files in and out using https:// and file://

Our install of WebSVN 2.3.3 was working before, but now give a blank page with this error:

XML error: no element found (3) at line 3 column 0 byte 28\ncmd: svn --non-interactive --config-dir /tmp log --xml --verbose -r HEAD:1 'file:///home/ckhronos/svn/repos/@HEAD' --limit 2

If we run: svn --non-interactive --config-dir /tmp log --xml --verbose -r HEAD:1 'file:///path/to/repos/@HEAD' --limit 2

from the command line we get a reasonable output:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<log>
<logentry
   revision="26184">
<author>authorname</author>
<date>2014-04-02T16:09:30.683040Z</date>
<msg>Short message.
</msg>
</logentry>
<logentry
   revision="26183">
<author>authorname</author>
<date>2014-04-02T15:46:03.903486Z</date>
<paths>
<path
   prop-mods="false"
   text-mods="true"
   kind="file"
   action="M">/path/to/file/edited.txt</path>
</paths>
<msg>Long message here</msg>
</logentry>
</log>

We are running CentOS 6.5 with PHP 5.4. We build subversion from source. Would anyone know why we might be getting this error?

Answer 1

There were two version of SVN on the server. One was the old 1.6.11 in /usr/bin/svn and the other the new 1.8.8 version at /usr/local/bin/svn. From the command line I was getting out put from the new /usr/local/bin/svn version. In PHP, where that command was run from, it was loading in the old version of svn.

Once I updated the path to point to the proper version of svn, all was fine.

Incidentally I found this bug by using:

echo stream_get_contents($pipes[2]);

To see what the real output was from the script.