Weird Subversion permissions issue

Question

I'm trying to set up SVN on a CentOS 5 system so that several people can use a repository.

• I've created the repository at /var/svnrepository.
• I added a subversion user and group, made that the owner of the repository recursively.
• I set permissions to 775 recursively.
• I ensured that all the system users are in the subversion group.

The problem I'm running into is that when I do a commit, SVN apparently creates a file called db/current and it has my username and group. So say my username is jimbo...

-rwxrwxr-x 1 jimbo      jimbo         11 Dec  2 01:09 current

Then after that no one else can check anything out. They get a permission denied error.

There's also a similar issue with a file called db/format.

Can not open file /var/svnrepository/contactdb/trunk/format: Permission denied

Has anyone else seen this? Know of a solution?

All repository access is through ssh.

The weird thing is, I've set up SVN on Linux before and never had this problem. I don't know what I'm doing differently this time.

Answer 1

Note, that usually the setGID is set on Subversions repository directory and their child directories:

drwxr-sr-x svnowner svnusers 4096 2008-11-01 .

by chmod 775 you unset this setGID bit and thats why the problems occurred:

The setGID means: if you create a file, the group will be set to svnusers(in my example), not your primary group.

I bet you do no have the SetGID bit set, do you?

However, it is better to change GID of the folders:

chmod g+s <REPO>/dir

it is best you look into a fresh created repository to match the permissions.

Answer 2

Are you using svnserve or is everyone going through file:/// URI's? Subversion recommends against the second. svnserve -d should be run as a single user.

Here is some documentation on trying to make multiple access methods work.