I admin a VisualSVN server for my development team, and some of them (that were not SVN admins) reported that they could not see all the revisions in the repository history.
I reviewed the repository permissions in the VisualSVN manager, and could find nothing that was excluding them from accessing the repository paths.
Is there some setting in VisualSVN that is denying access to the revision history for non admins?
I looked in the log files for the server, and noticed that I had a ton of current errors where users were being denied access to defect and feature branches I had deleted during a repository clean-up months ago. So, something was still persistently denying access on branches I had locked users out of in the repository, and then later deleted.
I dug around, and found a file in the conf directory of each repository that contained an auto-generated file named VisualSVN-WinAuthz.ini. In it, I discovered permissions I had set on long deleted content, and manually removing these items carefully allowed the users to see the history.
I am not advocating editing this file manually, it is just what I had to do to correct the issue my users were encountering. I could possibly have gone back in the TortoiseSVN repository browser to a historical revision where the branch was still present, and updated the permissions to nicely remove them from the file, but I had too many deleted paths to adjust.
Going forward, I will ensure that I set all the permissions on a repository path to inherit permissions from its parent before I delete it.