Frequent Questions and Problems

We will answer frequently occurring questions here. If you have a question that should be addressed here as well, please post it to the instructors' and tutors' mailing list.

Table of Contents (maintained manually; possibly incomplete; if in doubt please search full page text)

I can't access the SVN repository (for submitting my homework)

First of all, if any such problems occur very shortly before the submission deadline, or after the deadline has expired, please submit by sending an email to your tutor (preferably with a ZIP attachment having the same ex1, …, exN directory structure as the SVN), so that the time of your submission gets recorded.
Then, please see below whether you are experiencing a frequent problem, and whether the solutions pointed out below help.
Then, please send a detailed report of your problem to Christoph. (“I don't have access to SVN” or “SVN doesn't work” is not detailed and doesn't help me to investigate the problem.) Include information such as

  • the SVN software used (e.g. command-line SVN on the lab computers, TortoiseSVN on Windows, …)
  • whether you have access at all (try accessing https://codex.cs.bham.ac.uk/svn/langec/mscjava2012/submit/abc123 in the browser where abc123 is your username)
  • the local directory you are in, and what you were trying to commit
  • and most importantly: the complete error message you got from the SVN client

I can't commit a new folder for a new worksheet

If you encounter the following problem, …

% svn mkdir wk7   # i.e. you created a directory for the new worksheet
% svn commit -m "new" wk7
Adding         wk7
svn: Commit failed (details follow):
svn: Server sent unexpected return value (405 Method Not Allowed) in
response to MKCOL request for
'/svn/langec/mscjava2012/!svn/wrk/9b4e5bb1-aade-4c9d-934c-6702431a5022/submit/axp088/wk7'

… this is because the wk7 directory (and others, up to wk12) already exist in the repository, because I created all of them at once. This stupid error message is Subversion's way of reporting a directory conflict.

You need to do the following:

  1. move the stuff in your local wk7 directory to a safe place
  2. delete your local wk7 directory
  3. do an svn update – which will give you the wk7 directory that already exists in the repository
  4. move your stuff saved in step (1) into that wk7 directory, add it once more, then commit

SVN asks me for my GNOME keyring password

This problem sometimes occurs on the lab computers. If you are not knowingly using the GNOME keyring (which is a tool that remembers passwords for you), and if your computer science password is not accepted, you can solve the problem by deleting the keyring configuration:
rm ~/.gnome2/keyrings/login.keyring
(source)

PeerWise doesn't load

PeerWise, which we are using in our collaborative project, is not responsive at times, and sometimes completely down. As it is not hosted by us but by the University of Auckland, the only advice that we can give is: Wait a bit and try once more.