Afterwards, I needed to execute (within the context of the example quoted above)
$ sudo chmod g+w /var/svn/$REPOS/db/rep-cache.db
$ sudo chown www-data:www-data /var/svn/$REPOS/db/rep-cache.db
Otherwise I kept receiving a 409 error when committing local modifications
(though the commitments were server side effective, I needed to follow up with local updates)
