Svn – How to set max file size for commits in subversion

It's not possible. There is a long standing feature request for broadcasting configs to client. It's not presently due until 2.0, or later.

The closest you can come is to use hooks. Either with a pre-commit to prevent incorrectly configured clients from submitting the wrong data. Or a post-commit to retro-fix wrong data.

Neither is great and I believe the latter is even advised against.

I basically found it by analysing the svndump file and using a small python script:

$ # dump repository to file
$ svnadmin dump /var/lib/svn/ > svn_full_dump.txt

$ # find byte offsets of 'Revision-number' ignoring non-ascii and save in file
$ egrep -boa  '^Revision-number: .+$' svn_full_dump.txt > revisions.txt

$ head revisions.txt 
75:Revision-number: 0
195:Revision-number: 1
664:Revision-number: 2
863:Revision-number: 3
1058:Revision-number: 4
1254:Revision-number: 5
1858:Revision-number: 6

$ # find size of checkins and sort by size
$ python revision_size.py  | sort -nr | head
1971768485 r1528
44453981 r2375
39073877 r1507
34731033 r2394
30499012 r484
...

The python file is:

#!/usr/bin/env python

f = file('revisions.txt')

last_offset = 0
last_revision = None

for l in f:
    l = l.strip()
    (offset, middle, revision) = l.split(':')
    offset = int(offset.strip())

    revision_size = offset-last_offset
    if last_revision:
        print '%s r%s'%(revision_size, last_revision.strip())

    last_revision = revision
    last_offset = offset

# will ignore last revision

f.close()

update: fixed a bug in the revision_size script where the size wasn't quite matched up to the right revision.