Question

403 Forbidden error using Subversion

I recently upgraded to Subversion 1.5, and now I cannot commit my code to the repository. I get an error message: "403 Forbidden in response to MKACTIVITY". I know the upgrade worked because my fellow developers are not getting this issue. What's going on?

 45  102456  45
1 Jan 1970

Solution

 54

Answering my own question:

Apparently my SVN URL had the wrong case! A Google search turned up an article (no longer available online) that explained what was going on. My URL was of the form http://svn.foobar.com/foobar but the actual repository was called http://svn.foobar.com/fooBar.

I use TortoiseSVN, so the fix was to use the Relocate command to correct the path to the repository.

Hopefully this will help someone else.

2008-09-11

Solution

 6

We run into the periodically and it is very frustrating to developers. For some reason reading from the repository seems to be case insensitive but commit cares.

I understand the reason why case matters due to Subversion's roots in unix filing systems that are case sensitive, but I really wish you would get the error on the initial checkout not on the commit!

2008-09-11