Issue #3242 is heating up.

Folks, we made a pretty serious regression in Subversion 1.5 regarding the
way our copy and move operations drive the commit editor. The result is
that operations previously permitted via a particular authz policy no longer
do. As a result, there are people still running 1.4 simply because they
can't use 1.5. That's really bad, because 1.4 has dropped from official
non-emergency support already. This is tracked in issue #3242 [1], and that
issue is started to heat up.

I see three courses of action:

  * Continue to ignore the issue. This comes with all the disadvantages
    you might assume from such a user-unfriendly approach.

  * Rewrite Subversion's authz framework, perhaps in the way I've
    recommended in issue #3380 [2]. This is very non-trivial amount
    of work though, and not backportable to existing release streams.

  * Fix the copy and move code to be more conservative in their
    approach. I took a stab at this a while ago, and got completely
    lost in the logic. My guess is that Hyrum is the only person who
    really has the big picture in his head there. But as a stopgap,
    I wonder if we couldn't just resurrect the 1.4 logic (as a sibling
    to the 1.5 stuff), and make the APIs fork immediately: doing a
    single-source copy or move? Use the old logic (plus some merge
    tracking handling). Else, use the new, multi-source-supporting
    stuff.

I'm a bit concerned about our relationship with our user base, and not just
saying that to be dramatic. What do you guys think? Is there anyone with
the time and a degree of focus who can get us out of this?

[1] http://subversion.tigris.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=3242
[2] http://subversion.tigris.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=3380

-- 
C. Michael Pilato <cmpilato_at_collab.net>
CollabNet   <>   www.collab.net   <>   Distributed Development On Demand
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