How to prevent svnserve from overwriting SVN repository permissions?

Question

Some coworkers and I are accessing SVN repositories through SSH. In order to make the repositories readable and writable to all of our accounts, we have created a group called "developers" and made each repository owned by that group.

However when one of us commits, certain files in the repositories have their permissions changed from adminuser:developers to user1:user1. This prevents any of the other users from committing to the same repository.

I have worked around this problem before, but I forgot how I did it. I have heard the "wrapper" idea, which involves writing a wrapper script for svnserve that changes the umask to 002 and then executes the actual svnserve binary. But that doesn't seem to be working for me now. How do I go about fixing this problem?

Answer 1

Ok, I found it. Full instructions can be found here: http://odyniec.net/articles/ubuntu-subversion-server/

Specifically, it says

Additionally, you need to make sure that all new files and directories created in the repos directory (in other words, anything committed to the repositories) will also be owned by the group. To accomplish this, use chmod again to set the set-group-ID bit on the directory, which causes any file created inside it to have the same group ownership as the directory itself. Effectively, everything in repos will belong to the svn group.

$ sudo chmod g+s /usr/local/svn/repos

For me, since I had multiple repositories already, I used

$ sudo chmod -R g+s /usr/local/svn/repos