ive been sitting on this for about 7 hours, and ive aged close to 7 years... ahhh, server admin does that to me.
i have svn wired through apache2 with webdav in the usual manner (basically like http://www.howtoforge.com/setting-up-subversion-with-webdav-post-commit-hook-and-multiple-sites-on-jaunty-jackalope-ubuntu-9.04). ive had endless problems with this (i didnt on my previous ubuntu server install, although this is ubuntu 10.10): this happened, and was fixed like in the post: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2547400/how-do-you-fix-an-svn-409-conflict-error
this looks like my issue, although its not my solution: Apache & SVN on Ubuntu - Post-commit hook fails silently, pre-commit hook “Permission Denied”
my commit to svn works (finally). although the post-commit hook which is supposed to svn update the working copy of the repo on the server, doesn't work.
the post-commit hook itself executes, and has sudo permissions (as in the setup url above. testing with whoami >> somelogfile.log or sudo whoami >> somelogfile.log shows www-data and root, respectively), although it wont perform the svn update (sudo svn update /var/www/gameServer >> /var/svn/gameServer.log). similar to the serverfault url above, when i perform the exact command it does update the working copy to the latest revision, just not through the post-commit hook.
an age old question that is 90% of the time a permissions issue. but in pure frustration i chmod 777 lots of stuff not to mention the fact that www-data is in /etc/sudoer so it shouldnt even need that.
im collapsing in front of the screen partly out of frustration and partly out of sleepiness. any direction would be appreciated.