[plt-dev] svn annoyances

FWIW, I agree with Eli that this deserves a post on the svn mailing
list and if that doesn't help, nothing else. It is an annoyance, but
not more.

Robby

On Mon, Feb 9, 2009 at 6:58 PM, Sam TH <samth at ccs.neu.edu> wrote:
> 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!
>> _________________________________________________
>>  For list-related administrative tasks:
>>  http://list.cs.brown.edu/mailman/listinfo/plt-dev
>>
>
>
>
> --
> sam th
> samth at ccs.neu.edu
>