How do I diagnose “svn commit” getting stuck before it starts?

Question

I'm commiting a large changeset, including a large binary file (180 MB) over a slow VPN connection. It looks for all the world like it is stalled. How can I diagnose where it is stuck?

The output is:

$ svn commit -m "My commit message"
Connecting to deprecated signal QDBusConnectionInterface::serviceOwnerChanged(QString,QString,QString)`

Local subversion is 1.6.9 on Linux, KDE 4.3, and svn status shows

 ML     .                      
  L     ws                     
M       ws/manage.py           
  L     ws/locales             
  L     ws/locales/ja_JP       
  L     ws/locales/ja_JP/LC_MESSAGES

The process isn't using much of any resources.

The server is Linux, served by Apache and mod_dav_svn, same subversion 1.6.9. I can't see any process that is handling the commit.

Answer 1

It was stalled trying to get credentials from the desktop environment's password store. There was a dialog box on a different desktop that was asking for my KDE Wallet password. Once I entered it, the commit proceeded:

$ svn commit -m "My commit message"
Connecting to deprecated signal QDBusConnectionInterface::serviceOwnerChanged(QString,QString,QString)`
Sending        .                                                                                                                
Sending        File1                                                                                                    
Sending        File2                                                                                                  
...

Subversion 1.6 added a feature where the OS password store could be used for subversion passwords (for example, in the KDE Wallet or Gnome Keyring). See http://subversion.apache.org/docs/release-notes/1.6.html#auth-related-improvements . This is a huge security win, but those familiar with subversion 1.5 and earlier may forget about it, and be too busy staring at the command line to look for a dialog box.