If you building a centralized development environment for a team or large group of users, the question of centralizing user identities, authentication and authorization is always popping up and the answer is often to use an LDAP directory server. The developer section of the OpenDS documentation wiki has a set of tutorials for using the OpenDS LDAP directory server with various web servers and open source project like GlassFish, Apache Tomcat, SugarCRM… But not yet for Subversion. Thankfully, Wooter van Reeven, Senior Consultant at Yenlo has just published a long and detailed tutorial for setting up Subversion authentication and authorization through LDAP, with OpenDS and Apache2.
Update on March 18th.
Wooter has also posted a copy of the article on OpenDS documentation wiki.
I’ve also been aware of an older article on the subject of Subversion with Apache and LDAP by Jeremy Whitlock, engineer in the CollabNet Subversion team. This article contains more details on the Apache configuration parameters and snippets for both Apache 2.0 and Apache 2.2.
Technorati Tags: developer, directory-server, java, ldap, opends, opensource, tip
Ludo Sketches 
This is very interesting and shows the power of apache authentication and authorization against an LDAP directory.
Just for precision, this methods works only if you can have 1 project = 1 SVN repository. Indeed, all projects hosted in one repository can only have the same authorization rules trough WebDAV. If you need more, you have to describe users and groups in a local SVN authz file, and then your LDAP will not be used anymore.