I was about to excuse my late blogging absence by giving you guys a cool article. An article that explains setting up a state-of-the-art LAMP installation on your home machine, including the latest versions of PHP (5.1.1) and MySQL. It would also include versioning, using subversion (SVN), to be conveniently accessed from your other machines using Samba in combination with any SVN client. The whole article would be simple to follow and let you set all this up in about 30 minutes.

So where is it? Well, I've been wasting my weekend and the last two evenings on getting the version management tooling setup correctly. The rest, about 90% of the work, I had done in about 2 hours. What I want is my (PHP) code to be under version control on my Linux server and to be accessible from my other machine, a Windows box. This requires:

• Configuration of Samba for remote access to the code. No problem, takes about 5 minutes.
• The installation of the TortoiseSVN client on the Windows box. Again, a 5 minute job.
• Installation of Subversion on the Linux box. Easy, I installed the packages using YaST
• Configuring Apache to link to Subversion using WebDav. This will make the repositories available by a HTTP URL, which I need from the TortoiseSVN client.

The last part is where it all went wrong. I've been fighting package dependencies, inconsistent documentation, reinstalls, you name it. This is where I really hate Linux. It often requires me to have detailed knowledge about package versions, their dependencies and the impact it will have to update them. Meanwhile, you just have to pray that the hard work you put in your current setup will still work after a change. And updates you will have to do a lot, many " modern" distributions still ship with ancient packages for crucial components, such as PHP and Apache. The control Linux offers is great, but often I don't want it. I mean why, why o why, does the greatest web server in the world, Apache, still does not have an administration program? Why do I have to manually edit several config files in a backwards syntax?

Now that I have that of my chest, I will describe my problem in more detail. I have little hope for a solution, but maybe it is worth a try.

After installing SubVersion on Linux, I want Apache to take care of the network transport later, this will enable it to serve Subversion repositories. According to all the manuals, this is what I need to add to the Apache config file:

Loading the first library alone works fine. Loading both of them creates an error:

The error occurs in mod_dav_svn.so, yet originates in mod_dav_fs.so. There is hardly anything to find on the net about this problem, but this guy thinks that the cause is an outdated mod_dav_fs.so file. If he is right, it suggests I need to update the entire Apache RPM (because the fs package is part of that). Not only will this overwrite my current setup, it will also ruin my entire idea of a simple setup scenario. The upgrade would not make sense either, I'm using the latest version of Apache, it is impossible that a package that is 2 years older can complain about it being outdated.

I'm now at the point of giving up, thinking I would never have this problem on Windows. Even a complete reinstall did not fix anything. I've now ordered some Ubuntu CDs, perhaps a different distribution will fix this. If not, I'm going back to a WAMP setup. Simply because I don't have time for this. End of rave.

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