I am running Subversion 1.5.4, as installed from the Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty repositories and –pid-file is now a valid argument for svnserve.

I changed the start block as such:

start)
echo -n “Starting Subversion (SVN) Server”
start-stop-daemon –start –quiet \
–exec /usr/bin/svnserve — -dr $REPOS_DIR \
–pid-file=$PIDFILE
#PID=`pidof svnserve` || true
#echo $PID > $PIDFILE
echo “.”
;;

I also added the LSB init lines so that the update-rc.d wouldn’t have warnings. I basically used the apache file as a template.

### BEGIN INIT INFO
# Provides: svnserve
# Required-Start: $local_fs $remote_fs $network $syslog
# Required-Stop: $local_fs $remote_fs $network $syslog
# Default-Start: 2 3 4 5
# Default-Stop: 0 1 6
# Short-Description: Start svnserve daemon at boot time
# Description: Enable svnserve by daemon.
### END INIT INFO