Subversion transactions within post-commit

Hi list

I've been stumped by this issue for months. I had never enough time to
troubleshoot it, so I'm finally desperate after having spent an entire
day trying to figure things out.

We have a _local_ checkout of the repository on our server, and our
post-commit hook needs to run svn-add, svn-rm and svn-ci commands in
that checkout. All of these commands run fine. For eg. (within the
post-commit script):

echo "Updating..."
svn up

would yield:

Updating...
Updated to revision $whatever.

And:

echo "Adding..."
svn add

would output:

Adding...
A $whatever

Now comes the interesting part. As soon as I add a commit transaction,
say, AFTER those commands, ALL of them FAIL at the SAME TIME:

echo "Updating.."
svn up
echo "Adding..."
svn add $whatever
echo "Committing..."
svn ci -m "$whatever"

gives us:

Updating...
svn: Working copy '.' locked
svn: run 'svn cleanup' to remove locks (type 'svn help cleanup' for details)
Adding...
svn: Working copy '.' locked
svn: run 'svn cleanup' to remove locks (type 'svn help cleanup' for details)
Committing...
svn: Working copy '.' locked
svn: run 'svn cleanup' to remove locks (type 'svn help cleanup' for details)

Notes:

* It is always reproducible. I just remove the commit command from the
script and everything works as expected.

* The owner of the checked out repo is a normal user of the web
account, but post-commit is run by 'apache'.

* We have the repo chown'ed to $user:$user and perms set to 775.

* The user 'apache' is also part of the group $user, but the user
$user is _not_ part of the group 'apache' (not possible for security
reasons on the server).

* As such, both the currently logged in user and 'apache' can at least
do update transactions without any errors.

Another very important note:

* Since post-commit runs as 'apache', some Subversion files (not sure
which) are created with perms 444.

Would appreciate some help in this matter. Thanks!

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