The other day, I got stuck on a problem with TortoiseSVN for about half a day! 😯
Yes, I know, it is a pretty long time to get a simple subversion client working…

The error I was continuously getting was:

Network connection closed unexpectedly

Nothing else! Nothing in the log files on both the client and the server. 🙁
The funny thing is that it was working perfectly fine using a command line client or even Eclipse Subversive.

After a (too) long time of investigation, I noticed that I was getting the following warnings when I was running the following command line directly on the server:

$ svn list svn+ssh://smoreau@localhost/data/svn/
svn: warning: cannot set LC_CTYPE locale
svn: warning: environment variable LANG is en_US.UTF-8
svn: warning: please check that your locale name is correct
smoreau@localhost's password:
svnserve: warning: cannot set LC_CTYPE locale
svnserve: warning: environment variable LANG is en_US.UTF-8
svnserve: warning: please check that your locale name is correct
branches/
tags/
trunk/

Actually, any svn command was triggering the warning messages:

$ svn info
svn: warning: cannot set LC_CTYPE locale
svn: warning: environment variable LANG is en_US.UTF-8
svn: warning: please check that your locale name is correct

Could it possibly be related with my TortoiseSVN problem?
Because I didn’t have any other idea, I decided to give it a go. 😉

It appears that these warning messages came from a configuration problem around the locale package on the server. Indeed, look what we get if we run the locale command:

$ locale -a
locale: Cannot set LC_CTYPE to default locale: No such file or directory
locale: Cannot set LC_MESSAGES to default locale: No such file or directory
locale: Cannot set LC_COLLATE to default locale: No such file or directory
C
POSIX

After some more investigation, it looks like this problem appeared when I upgraded the version of the locale package via APT. 😕

Once again, I asked my friend Google to help me out. It suggested me the following solutions:

• Run locale-gen en_US.UTF-8 – Didn’t work
• Run update-locale LANG=en_US.UTF-8 – Didn’t work
• Run dpkg-reconfigure locales – WORKED 😀

In conclusion, I wasn’t able to use TortoiseSVN because of a configuration problem on the locale package after an upgrade… Does it make sense? 🙄