Sat, 27 May 2006
I noticed recently that my SVN::Web pages had stopped working. Today I found a little time to investigate. My apache error log said:
Can't locate object method "caught" via package "SVN::Web::X" at /usr/local/share/perl/5.8.7/SVN/Web.pm
Nice.
I remembered having a bit of hassle installing it first time around primarily because it wasn't ready for Apache2, so I punched "SVN::Web Apache2" into Google, and surprised myself when I noticed that my notes page was the second hit. It was top on MSN.
Aha! So that's the reason I write these notes!
My notes told me which modules I could let debian install and which I had to manage myself. They also told me the hacks I had made to make things work with Apache2.
So in these situations I normally make sure I'm running the latest versions of everything. The bug I'm chasing might already be fixed. The first thing I noticed was that there was a new version of SVN::Web iteslf. So I installed it.
Since I had first installed SVN::Web debian had upgraded from Perl 5.8.7 to 5.8.8, so the latest SVN::Web installed into a slightly different directory. During the installation it told me that Exception::Class was out of date and asked if it should be updated. I declined since currently Exception::Class was installed as a debian package and I was hoping it could stay that way. (In fact, I had also installed it from CPAN, but didn't read enough of my notes to notice that.)
After installing the latest SVN::Web, I tried running it, just to see what happened. I was expecting loads of errors since my hacky patches were now lost. In fact, I got exactly the same error as before. Good News! That seemed to show that SVN::Web now works with Apache2, and my hacks were no longer required.
But the original problem remained. So I installed the latest Exception::Class, which hadn't yet made it into debian, tried again and everything just worked.
Wonderful!
Now, if only there was a debian package of SVN::Web so that someone else could worry about all this.
So once again I battled SVN::Web and debian and I prevailed! And once again you can see the results at svnweb.
