By This past weekend I was doing some work on a couple WordPress plugins that I have hosted in the WordPress plugin repository. One of them has been there since May of 2013 and the other was just approved this weekend. I had made some updates to the older plugin and needed to commit those changes to the repository, and I needed to upload the new plugin for the first time.
But there was a problem. I was using TortoiseSVN, and every single time I tried to do a commit or tag the new version, TortoiseSVN came back with an error message saying that the commit had failed and that the “Server sent unexpected return value (400 Bad Request) in response to PROPPATCH request for ‘/svn/txn/xxxxxx-xxxx'” (see screenshot below)
This was frustrating, and I won’t tell you how long I spent Googling different variations of this error trying to find a solution. I uninstalled and installed four or five different versions of Tortoise, from 1.6.xx to 1.8.2. I even emailed plugins [at] wordpress.org and started a conversation, but the summary of that was that they don’t use TortoiseSVN, so they probably couldn’t help.
Finally, and I’m not sure why this popped into my head, I thought that I’d try doing the initial SVN Checkout to a local directory using https://plugins.svn.wordpress.org/[plugin-name] instead of http:// like I had been doing.
Yes! Commits, tags, everything’s working! Plugins are uploaded, updated, and I’m happy. I don’t know if this is the result of a bug, a quirk, an obscure setting that I’m not seeing, or just the way things work. But for now, that’s okay.