Watch out for permissions in Fedora Core 3 with Subversion behind Apache

Getting Subversion in Fedora Core 3 is easy. You can use yum to get subversion and the mod_dav_svn Apache module. But it won’t work, because FC3 has SELinux configured out of the box. The Subversion FAQ talks about this now (but I didn’t see this in the Subversion Book yet). Yes, your files can be 777 and still not accessible to Apache. Unfortunately, the command listed in the Subversion FAQ didn’t work for me. I ended up using system-config-securitylevel to turn off SELinux for Apache.

Also interesting: there is a debate in Subversion land about using Berkeley DB vs. the Filesystem storage (FSFS). The crux of the debate is that your Berkeley DB can get hosed for a number of reasons (borked permissions, out of disk space, process dying, cosmic rays). Scripts are provided to allow a hot backup of your repository, so this shouldn’t be a big deal once you get your backups running in cron. But, I opted to go with the newer FSFS setup, which is really simple and seems pretty foolproof.