easy_install http://svn.edgewall.org/repos/trac/branches/0.11-stable

Since the release of Subversion 1.5 the version of easy_install included in the Debian repository ran into a compatibility issue. Instead of working as expected it always complained:

error: Unexpected HTML page found at http://svn.edgewall.org/repos/trac/branches/0.11-stable

The problem seems to be that the SVN-Web-Output generated by Subversion 1.5+ is not being understanded by setuptools. In the issue tracker for the trac-plugin-project trac-hacks.org I found the easiest way to solve this problem. You will use the setuptools to update itself and then you won’t have problems anymore:

easy_install -U setuptools

PS: This problem also occured when trying to install plugins from trac-hacks.org since they also use SVN 1.5+.

The upgrade went fine but after it was finished trac (0.11.2.1 ) refused to start, throwing the error message

DatabaseError: file is encrypted or is not a database

According to the ticket system of trac the problem is the wrong version of sqlite which is used by trac. Sadly all my efforts to make the database useable again failed with the error message above.

After some research I discovered another way to let trac use the default sqlite3 but keeping my data alive. This chatlog states a simple way to convert your sqlite2 database to the newer sqlite3-format. Here is a quick walkthrough:

1. Install the packages sqlite (v2) and sqlite3 (guess the version )
   ^?View Code BASH

   aptitude install sqlite sqlite3

2. Dump the old database and convert it to sqlite3
   ^?View Code BASH

   cd /path/to/trac-repos cd db mv trac.db trac.db.old-sqlite2 sqlite trac.db.old-sqlite2 .dump | sqlite3 trac.db chown www-data:www-data trac.db /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

And you’re done. The old database is now named trac.db.old-sqlite2 in case you need it for whatever reason. The new one is named with the default name trac.db so trac will use this one if not specified otherwise in conf/trac.ini.

I hope this tip saves you from some worries after upgrading to Debian Lenny. Keep on coding!