making the switch to svn over dav
Well, actually, I don’t plan to switch. I don’t think I have any real need to, although I guess I’ll find out if someday my client starts complaining that I’m able to see or create or modify some file that came in through WebDAV.
I’ve been saying for a long time that I’d set up svn_dav so that I can have more people work on some of the code I’ve got in my repository. I really didn’t want to have to give them all system accounts, but I wanted to make it possible to give out access. Shawn S. said he’d help me set things up, which I knew would be stupidly simple, but it’s useful to have someone there to say, “No, if you do that you will waste several hours.”
Well, I kept putting it off, and finally, despite the fact that Shawn was busy with some lame excuse like “spending time with his family,” I sat down to get things fixed. He was on IRC for the first half hour or so – long enough to react in horror (“Upgrade! Upgrade!”) when I said I was running Apache 2.0.47. (I installed it in July ‘03.)
I went through a few phases of recompiling things as I realized that I needed to tell Apache specifically that I wanted DAV, then I had to recompile svn for the new Apache, then I had to recompile Apache for SSL, then I had to recompile svn to build SSL into Neon. Bryan gave me a simple but super-useful little script to build a cert. The Apache documentation on getting a self-signed certificate built and in use by an HTTPS server is either hidden or horrible.
Eventually, I got everything working as I wanted. It took a little longer than it might have, but mostly because I wasn’t being very focused.
I also upgraded my SVN::Web installation, which wasn’t very exciting.
I’ll probably add a few more of my repositories to my svn_dav service, at least partially, at some point. I’d like to make some of my config files available, but not others. My mutt configuration might be a useful starting point for some, but my address book file is private, etc.
I also need to decide the simplest way to make the repository-less root of my svn HTTP server serve up a nice little page.
Anyway, now I can give commit rights to a few people who can then maybe write some patches for me. Would that be keen?