Noah Liebman

A Subversion Gripe & .htaccess mod_rewrite Issue

EDIT: It turns out the fix below for the mod_rewrite issue does not work. I'd love to know why. If anybody knows, please either comment on this post or reply to this thread. Thank you.

In starting this blog, I had to move my old website into a new branch of my homepage repository. I wanted to be able to do a server-side move from the root of the repository to a new subdirectory, like this:

svn mv http://noahlieban.com/svn/homepage/* \

http://noahliebman.com/svn/homepage/old-site/

Sadly, this didn't work. What did I have to do? Make the new directory (in the working directory or on the server; doesn't matter), then svn mv each file in one by one. Stupid. The reason is that it can't copy onto itself, which I guess is fair enough. The moral of the story is that a repository should always have a /trunk (or other root-level directory) just in case it needs to be branched. Otherwise, it's a pain.

My second issue is not really a Subversion issue, but with the .htaccess file that WordPress makes for its permalinks:

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>
# END WordPress

Now, I'm no expert in server configuration stuff, but this seems straightforward enough: If the requested file is neither a real file or real directory, do the rewrite rule. I don't actually care what the rewrite rule does, because my problem is that Dreamhost sets up Subversion by making it accessible via http request at http://domain.com/svn/repo/, although /svn/ is not a real directory in the root web directory on the server, so it gets caught by the second rewrite condition. This breaks Subversion over http.

I wanted to be able to add another condition that told it to only do the rule if the request URI does not start with /svn/, so I added

RewriteCod %{REQUEST_URI}!^/svn/.*$

to the other two conditions. For some reason, this didn't work, though. I instead needed to add a new rule in the affirmative above the WordPress one:

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/svn/.*$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ - [L]

i.e. if it starts with /svn/, don't change anything. Why doesn't it work with an exception? I have no idea.