Well, I just finished my wild-goose chase with Apache and subversion regarding a rather weird error. I recently reinstalled our subversion box, and ever since then I was unable to commit anything new to any of the repositories. Subversion told me this:

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svn-client admin-scripts [1] > svn ci -m "Directories for Tivoli Storage Manager Scripts."
svn: Commit failed (details follow):
svn: MKACTIVITY of '/svn/admin-scripts/!svn/act/someid': 302 Found

Apache didn’t say much about it either, besides this particular line:

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[25/Sep/2008:09:22:43 +0200] "MKACTIVITY /svn/admin-scripts/!svn/act/someid HTTP/1.1" 302 331

Today I sat down and thought really hard, what exactly was different from before.

  1. Installed Trac instead of Redmine, but that can’t have anything to do with the error
  2. Configured URL rewriting …

As it turns out, the following RewriteRule was the cause:

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  ## mod_rewrite
  RewriteEngine On
  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI}  !^/(projects|svn)* [NC]
  RewriteRule ^/  http://subversion.home.barfoo.org/projects [L,R]

After changing the Rewrite Rule (as showed below, compare the difference yourself 😛 ), it works just like a charm.

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  ## mod_rewrite
  RewriteEngine On
  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI}  !^/(projects|svn)/*$ [NC]
  RewriteRule ^/$  http://subversion.home.barfoo.org/projects [L,R]

Hint to self: whenever encountering HTTP 302 in conjunction with Subversion, check the RewriteRule’s ❗