Tickets :: Comment on [#5051] SVN integration is not robust and has poor error reporting

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Comment	> Judging from posts on the mailing lists, it is common that a user > installs Chora and configures it to use SVN but the content of the > repositories are not shown, yet there are no error messages and no > messages in the logs and there does not seem to be an apparent > misconfiguration. > > > > The attached patch tries to improve this situation by making the > following changes: > > > > (1) > > > > In VC::getPath(), the path of the SVN (or any other) binary is only > returned if php determines it is executable. This was introduced > without explanation in log message or comment in version 1.7: > > > > http://cvs.horde.org/diff.php?r1=1.6&r2=1.7&f=framework%2FVC%2FVC.php > > > > This is wrong for two reasons: > > > > First, when a PHP basedir restriction to the htdocs/ directory is > active (common on many webservers), PHP's built-in function > "is_executable" cannot access files in, say, /usr/bin although it can > execute this file. Infact, the only way to see if the file can be > executed is to try to execute it. Thus, the use of "is_executable" > here forces the user to extend the basedir restriction to /usr/bin, > which is a bad idea from a security point of view. > > > > Second, the error return value "false" is never checked within > "svn.php" and therefore wrong commands will be executed. E.g. when > the main module list of the SVN repository is supposed to be shown, > Chora will build a string of the form "/usr/bin/svn ls > /path/to/repository". If "/usr/bin/svn" is not found, "ls > /path/to/repository" will be executed instead. This will succeed (=> > no error message), but the returned output will not match the > expected output (=> modules list will be empty). Thus, the user has > no chance to find out what is wrong than to debug the code. > > > > Therefore the patch restores the code which was present in rev 1.6 of > VC.php. This will always try to execute the SVN binary. If the SVN > binary is not found, a sensible error message will be shown. > > > > (2) > > > > A common configuration on web servers (e.g. the default configuration > on SUSE 9.x) is that the apache process runs as root but the web > pages are handled by the "wwwroot" user which has low privileges. > Since the apache process is started as root, its HOME dir will point > to "/root". In this case, svn, when started by the "wwwroot" user > will look for the presence of "/root/.svn" and fail because it > obviously is denied access. This behaviour can be prevented by > explicitely setting the "--config-dir" directive to a directory the > current user has access to (say, something like "/tmp"). The attached > patch automates this behaviour. > >
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