Whatever you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it.
- Mahatma Gandhi

Monday, August 31, 2009

Internet Explorer Javascript Bug using Subscripts

While working on a project for somebody at work, we found a situation in which some script was working perfectly in all browsers, but was crashing in Internet Explorer 6.0. It turned out that if you use subscripts to access characters from a string, it gives an error. You have to do string.charAt(0) instead of string[0]. Just thought it would be something nice to note, if you ever have problems with that.

Thursday, August 06, 2009

Configuring Subversion with Apache

For work, I've been tasked with creating a subversion server that uses apache for an access layer and for authentication. To get this working, I decided to compile both subversion and apache from source. This allowed me to get the latest versions of both tools, and to be able to specify portions that I wanted either included or excluded.
The first thing that I did is to compile apache. I used the configure line:
./configure --prefix=/opt/httpd --enable-mods-shared="all"
The make; make install;
Then I configured subversion with the following options:
./configure --prefix=/opt/svn --with-ssl --with-apxs=/opt/httpd/bin/apxs --with-apr=/opt/httpd --with-apr-util=/opt/httpd
Then make; make install;
One problem I ran into was that initially I didn't have the apr-util portion added, and it didn't seem to work. I'm not 100% sure that it ended up being the problem, but it shouldn't hurt.
After that, I created a repository using svnadmin create and then added the location to the httpd.conf. Then I tried to access it over the http using a browser. It seemed to not work. I found on the web that many people had apr mismatches and things like that, but I ruled that out after some searching. Then I realized that the problem was possibly a permissions issue, so I changed the permissions on the repository. I tried again and things were still not working. Finally, I found a resource on the web that indicated that you might need to check permissions on directories above the repository. In this case, I had created the repository as root on /root, and I had to change the permissions of /root to allow apache to access it. Everything seems to be working now. Hopefully anybody else who is trying to make a setup like this will benefit from this information.