Subversion Problems

During some server maintenance, I upgraded Apache from 2.0 to 2.2, and it broke everything. I'm still dealing with the aftermath; one of the things that is still broken is Subversion authentication.

REXML's Subversion repository is served by Apache, with authentication through LDAP. While LDAP authentication works for every other module (WebDAV, for instance), any attempt to write to Subversion results in the following error:

svn: Commit failed (details follow):
svn: MKACTIVITY of '/repos/rexml/!svn/act/e6b9c92d-1f84-4ac6-81b8-ed3f67d85799': 500 Internal Server Error (http://www.germane-software.com)

On the server side, I see:

[Mon Apr 07 07:43:17 2008] [error] Internal error: pcfg_openfile() called with NULL filename
[Mon Apr 07 07:43:17 2008] [error] [client 192.168.0.112] (9)Bad file descriptor: Could not open password file: (null)

Mind you, I spent most of a Sunday googling for a resolution to this, and I did succeed in getting LDAP authentication working for everything but Subversion. There are no differences between the LDAP auth sections for Subversion than, for example, the WebDAV sections.

In any case, this has prompted me to proceed with my experiment with Mercurial (aka HG). I have a few other projects that I've been maintaining in Mercurial, but none as old and involved as REXML. One reason I've been hesitating with REXML is that converting to HG means breaking all of the Trac history linkage. However, right now I can commit to the HG repo, and I can't commit to the SVN repo, so for the moment REXML is being maintained in HG.

Read access to the SVN repo is still working. I'm not taking the Subversion repo off-line, and I'm mirroring all changes back to Subversion, but for the moment SVN is to be considered a clone and is read-only.

Oh, and if you have any suggestions for fixing SVN LDAP authentication, let me know