Cannot serve using bzr serve after doing an svn-import

[Anteru]

Hi,

we've just tried to serve a repository using plain bzr serve, but we're 
running into an error when trying to pull (shameless note: For a longer list 
of problems, see the "Migration from SVN" thread):

ERROR: Server sent an unexpected error: ('error', "[Errno 13] Can't open 
file '/home/someuser/.subversion/servers': Permission denied")

Notice that /home/someuser/... is world-readable. The interesting this is 
that it works when we serve as someuser, but it doesn't work when serving 
using another user, which leads us to the conclusion that bzr might try to 
write to that location. We tried to work around this by first importing into 
a temporary directory, and then branching into the repository which would be 
eventually served, but this results in the same error (idea was that it 
would break any SVN dependency.) Any idea what's going on here?

Just for sanity checking, the user under which bzr serve is running can cat 
that file, so reading does actually work. We can also branch locally using 
bzr branch /source /target using the server user. Only serving and accessing 
from remote fails.

Is there something similar to 
http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/HgWebDirStepByStep for Bazaar? We really 
looked hard for hard to set up a working Bzr server (as well as asked on 
this newsgroup), without joy, and I think other users may face similar 
problems as well.

Cheers,
  Anteru