[plt-dev] svn annoyances

The issue, as far as I can guess, is something that has to do with the
/usr permissions: under "some circumstances", "the svn client" will
try to query /usr for OPTIONS, and the HTTP server refuses.  IIUC, the
server should refuse these queries, so that part is not wrong.

However, it is not clear to me what are the circumstances where this
happens, and if it's specific to all svn clients, to some, or to all
clients on some platform.  FWIW, the problems have started happenning
only since the upgrade of the (svn) server to 1.5.  In addition, I
remember some svn client fixes that were related to such issues -- and
I think it was related to making the client less likely to perform
that kind of query.  There a little more information in an strace that
Carl sent of a failed svn client invocation -- it showed exactly two
OPTIONS queries: one in his directory (which is fine, and it passed),
and one to /usr, but it is not clear from the trace why it decided to
do that on /usr.

So currently, the above is what I know.  It might be because of a
subversion server issue, a client issue, a server configuration issue,
or an authz configuration of a specific directory.  I can't tell any
more than that.  Also, these problems all "feel the same" (they
usually manifest themselves by an in valid /usr query), but I don't
know if they are the same.

I also cannot offer any more help in trying to resolve it, without the
minimum of a way to repeat the problem.  (Debugging a piece of
software that I didn't write (+ configuration) for a situation that I
cannot repeat is pretty much as effective as me banging the keyboard
and hope for the problem to go away.)  What I can offer is to put the
configurations out somewhere so anyone who wants can see if they can
figure out what the problem is (some parts of the configurations are
in iplt/svn), I can create an exact copy of the /usr repository and
proxy changes to the web server configuration to try things out, and I
can send the log files.

Other than that, the best course of action seems to me like going to
the subversion mailing list and seeing if there's anything useful
there.

-- 
          ((lambda (x) (x x)) (lambda (x) (x x)))          Eli Barzilay:
                  http://www.barzilay.org/                 Maze is Life!