AuthzSVNAccessFile and collection path syntax

Everyone,

My first attempt at opening up a subdirectory of a repository for public
access failed failed. I was doing this:

[repos:/]
@mygroup=rw

[repos:/public/]
@mygroup=rw
*=r

I changed the subdirectory designation to this, and things worked:

[repos:/public]

I'm wondering why the decision was made to have a path not ending with
slash designate a collection (i.e. directory), but to have Subversion
not recognize a path ending in a slash?

According to general URI convention and the WebDAV specification, along
with several later community discussions, the canonical way to represent
a collection is with an ending slash. Technically, there could be two
distinct resources, /public and /public/, only the latter of which is a
collection. (The former could be a text file, for instance.)

(In fact, this relates to the reason we have to put BrowserMatch
"Microsoft Data Access Internet Publishing Provider" redirect-carefully
in our Apache config files: Microsoft WebFolders won't correctly
redirect from /repos to /repos/ (and to make matters worse converts
user-entered /repos/ to /repos), meaning we have to tell mod_dav to
simply give /repos/ when asked for /repos instead of redirecting for Web
Folder clients. But I digress.)

The Subversion convention of no trailing slash is also inconsistent with
its method of designating a repository root directory. (Consistency
would call for using [repos:] as the root designation.)

Comments?

Garret

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Received on Thu Jul 7 06:51:39 2005