I recently upgraded our Hudson install to 1.238. After doing so various of our
builds are failing with "This client is too old to work with working copy '.';
please get a newer Subversion client." The failures are due to the fact that a
build may be dependent on calling the installed subversion client on the system
which may be older than Hudson's svnkit version. This issue appears is noted
here: https://hudson.dev.java.net/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=1856. As noted there is
a problem with this update for some configurations. On Linux boxes with package
management, you are limited to what is installed by package management. On
RedHat 4.x that's svn 1.3.x, and on Redat 5.x that's svn 1.4.x. Given that,
since Hudson is now at 1.5, we either have to break package management, or roll
back to an earlier version of Hudson and never upgrade. Two better alternatives
would be to: 1.) Allow configuration so that Hudson used the command-line client
installed on the system, or 2.) Allow for configuration to set a subversion
compatibility level for the Hudson instance of 1.3, 1.4, or 1.5. Either or both
alternatives would be excellent.