Bad error message when the URL doesn't point to a repository

Earlier today, Julian noted the following on IRC:

$ svn ls http://svn.apache.org/foo
svn: E170013: Unable to connect to a repository at URL 'http://svn.apache.org/foo'
svn: E175009: The XML response contains invalid XML
svn: E130003: Malformed XML: no element found

While the first error (Unable to connect ...) makes sense, the errors
about invalid XML do not. It turns out that these errors are generated
when ra_serf tries to parse the OPTIONS response during server
capability negotiation:

$ curl -i -X OPTIONS http://svn.apache.org/foo
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Tue, 06 Feb 2018 16:31:51 GMT
Server: Apache/2.4.7 (Ubuntu)
Allow: GET,HEAD,POST,OPTIONS
Content-Length: 0

It turns out that our Expat response handler does not check the response
Content-Length header nor the Content-Type. I was going to add these
checks so that we can generate better error messages, but I'm not too
familiar with ra_serf so I wonder if there's a chance that adding these
checks would break anything.

As far as I can see, mod_dav_svn will always correctly set at least
Content-Type (Content-Length is not relevant for chunked responses).

-- Brane
Received on 2018-02-06 18:35:49 CET