SVN 1.6 - not a valid URL - macos

Question

Recently I uninstalled SVN 1.7 from mac osx and installed SVN 1.6.23 following the instructions on this page: How do I uninstall subversion on OS X
'svn --version' runs well and says 1.6.23 is installed.
but when I run:
svn info http://www.domainname.com/svn/path_to_folder
it gives me following error:
http://www.domainname.com/svn/path_to_folder: (Not a valid URL)
svn: A problem occurred; see other errors for details
The command works fine on another mac which had SVN 1.6.18 preinstalled. So there is no problem with the server or the commands. Does anyone know what it could be?

Answer 1

You don't have any repository access module (RA) that can communicate with repositories using the HTTP protocol. If you only have ra_svn and ra_local you can only use svn: or file: URLs:
* ra_neon : Module for accessing a repository via WebDAV protocol using Neon.
- handles 'http' scheme
- handles 'https' scheme
* ra_svn : Module for accessing a repository using the svn network protocol.
- with Cyrus SASL authentication
- handles 'svn' scheme
* ra_local : Module for accessing a repository on local disk.
- handles 'file' scheme
* ra_serf : Module for accessing a repository via WebDAV protocol using serf.
- handles 'http' scheme
- handles 'https' scheme
You've apparently compiled your own binaries. The INSTALL file mentions this:
b. Serf library 0.3.0 or newer (http://code.google.com/p/serf/)
serf is a library for HTTP and WebDAV which is an alternative to
Neon for accessing Subversion repositories over http:// and https://
URLs. serf is designed as an asynchronous library which can take
advantage of HTTP pipelining, so ra_serf may be more efficient than
ra_neon and better for HTTP proxy caches. The serf library can be
found at:
http://code.google.com/p/serf/
In order to use ra_serf instead of ra_neon, you must install serf,
and run Subversion's ./configure with the argument --with-serf. (To
only use ra_serf and not ra_neon, you should also use
--without-neon.) If serf is installed in a non-standard place, you should use
--with-serf=/path/to/serf/install
instead. If you build with both ra_neon and ra_serf, Subversion
will use ra_neon by default; add "http-library = serf" to the
[global] section of your ~/.subversion/servers file to use ra_serf
instead.
For more information on serf and Subversion's ra_serf, see the file
subversion/libsvn_ra_serf/README.