[plt-dev] svn annoyances

Here's a reproduction recipe:

check out a copy of your usr dir into my-usr.
/> cd my-usr/
my-usr> touch foo
my-usr> svn add foo
my-usr> svn ci foo -m "."
my-usr> svn mv foo bar
my-usr> svn ci foo bar -m "."


then go to a different, pre-existing checkout of your usr dir, perhaps
called orig-usr

orig-usr> svn up

get the error:

svn: Server sent unexpected return value (403 Forbidden) in response
to OPTIONS request for 'http://svn.plt-scheme.org/usr'

sam th (who just hosed his usr checkout testing this).


On Mon, Feb 9, 2009 at 7:51 PM, Eli Barzilay <eli at barzilay.org> wrote:
> 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!
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>



-- 
sam th
samth at ccs.neu.edu