On Thu, Dec 09, 2004 at 01:16:56PM -0800, Wilfredo_Sánchez wrote:
> I accidentally gave someone the wrong URL and they got errors which
> confused the hell out of them. A couple of examples follow.
>
> Attempt to check out a plain HTTP URL:
>
> [pucca:/tmp] wsanchez% svn co http://foo.apple.com/foo/bar
> subversion/libsvn_ra_dav/util.c:670: (apr_err=175002)
> svn: PROPFIND request failed on '/foo/bar'
> subversion/libsvn_ra_dav/util.c:294: (apr_err=175002)
> svn: PROPFIND of '/foo/bar': 405 Method Not Allowed
> (http://foo.apple.com)
>
> Attempt to check out a WebDAV URL:
>
> [pucca:/tmp] wsanchez% svn co http://foo.apple.com/dav/
> subversion/libsvn_ra_dav/util.c:670: (apr_err=175002)
> svn: PROPFIND request failed on '/dav'
> subversion/libsvn_ra_dav/util.c:294: (apr_err=175002)
> svn: PROPFIND of '/dav': 301 Moved Permanently (http://foo.apple.com)
>
> These make sense to svn developers, and might make sense to the
> repository admins and maybe web server admins using subversion, but
> they don't really tell you the obvious thing: the provided URL is not a
> URL to a Subversion repository.
>
> The first error (405) is pretty clear to a web admin; I screwed up
> the access controls. The second is the one that happened in our case
> and it threw me for a loop until I realized that it was the wrong URL.
>
> Perhaps these could be made clearer.
I don't see how. We don't *KNOW* that it isn't a URL to a Subversion
repository. We're just passing back what the HTTP server on the other
side said to us. The only thing we can do is add some explanatory text
when we get HTTP errors that suggest that they check their URL. But
this may be equally confusing to people when the error is actually a
server side configuration error as the case may be.
Basically, we get back HTTP errors that are ambiguous. This is a
consequense of using an existing protocol for something other than what
it was originally envisioned for.
--
Ben Reser <ben@reser.org>
http://ben.reser.org
"Conscience is the inner voice which warns us somebody may be looking."
- H.L. Mencken
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Received on Sat Dec 11 18:49:20 2004