[Warning: This matter is far from highly pertinent. One tackles strange non-problems when in an atypical environment, such as a hotel room in CA.]
I had someone ask me about Subversion autoindex support. So, like, you point a web browser at http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/subversion/site/publish/ and *pow* magically you are now looking at the index.html inside that directory. Clearly, this could be done with an hour or two of mod_dav_svn hackery and some new directives there. But I was trying to come up with an httpd.conf workaround that did the trick. Here's what I tried. (On my system, all my Subversion repositories live inside the /repos/ Location.) # If this is a GET request (but not a subrequest) aimed at my # collection of Subversion repositories and with a trailing slash, and # if there exists an index.html file inside that directory, then # temporarily redirect the browser to the index.html file. RewriteEngine on RewriteCond %{IS_SUBREQ} false RewriteCond %{REQUEST_METHOD} GET RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/repos/.*/$ RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI}index.html -U RewriteRule /repos/(.*)/$ /repos/$1/index.html [L,R] The result was that for every directory in which an index.html was found, that file was served (via a browser redirect). Yay! Unfortunately, the redirect was transmitted for directories which had no index.html child, too. Boo! Sadly, I found that despite the fact that the Apache docs say about that "-U" test the following: '-U' (is existing URL, via subrequest) Checks whether or not TestString is a valid URL, accessible via all the server's currently-configured access controls for that path. This uses an internal subrequest to do the check, so use it with care - it can impact your server's performance! In reality "validity" in this context seems to have nothing to do with "existence". I traced the subrequest that mod_rewrite made into Subversion, and found that it never enters mod_dav to actually perform an existence get. I guess I expected that the subrequest would GET all the way into Subversion, where it would get the appropriate error code (HTTP_NOT_FOUND). In retrospect, I think I knew that subrequests don't behavior like full-fledged content-fetching requests. But the documentation quoted above is pretty misleading, at any rate, IMO. -- C. Michael Pilato <cmpil...@collab.net> CollabNet <> www.collab.net <> Distributed Development On Demand
