Subversion: no webdav loging when access via browser

Question

There is a subversion server working with Apache as it's frontend. I turned on custom logging in my VirtualHost section:

CustomLog /var/log/svn/webdav.log "%t %u repo:%{SVN-REPOS-NAME}e action:%{SVN-ACTION}e (%B Bytes in %T Sec)" env=SVN-ACTION

When I use an SVN client, I can see the following operations in webdav.log:

action:checkout-or-export
action:commit

But if I use a web-browser to browse repositories nothing is logged. And in the access log there are only standard GET requests even if I request a precise revision via ?p=revision_number (which means I'm certainly dealing with dav_svn Apache module)

Why is that happening? What is the difference between using svn-client and plain browser behaviors?

Answer 1

The SVN Client is talking WebDAV to your Server: He sents PROPFIND, PROPGET etc. messages to retrieve a lot of informations from the SVN repo: last changed revision, last author, etc.

The Browser is just asking a GET-HTTP command. This is strictly speaking not a real SVN action. You just looking at some part of the repository. You can download a single file or list a directory. But you cannot do anything meaningful in terms of SVN.

So this is not going into the log file, because there is no SVN Action corresponding to that.