Memo from git-svn: Could not unmemoize! (25 Oct 2011)

After upgrading to Ubuntu 11.10, git-svn started giving me a hard time.

Updates from the SVN master repository started to fail with error messages like this:

Byte order is not compatible at ../../lib/Storable.pm (autosplit into ../../lib/auto/Storable/_retrieve.al) line 380, 
  at /usr/share/perl/5.12/Memoize/Storable.pm line 21

Could not unmemoize function `lookup_svn_merge', because it was not memoized to begin with 
  at /usr/lib/git-core/git-svn line 3213
END failed--call queue aborted at /usr/lib/git-core/git-svn line 40.

Apparently, git-svn maintains cached meta information in .git/svn/.caches, which the Perl Storable.pm library choked on. I guess what happened is that Ubuntu 11.10 came with a more recent version of Perl and the Perl libraries, and the new version of Storable.pm did not know how to handle data stored with older versions. Again, just a guess. Discussions at http://lists.debian.org/debian-perl/2011/05/msg00023.html, http://lists.debian.org/debian-perl/2011/05/msg00026.html and http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=618875 suggest this may in fact a bug in the git-svn scripts, but I did not venture to analyse the problem any further.

Anyway, the following took care of the problem for me:

  rm -rf .git/svn/.caches

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