I have a question about Apache authentication, which I'm hoping someone will be able to help me with.

I want a subversion repository where /home is less restrictive than anyplace else on the system. That is, I give many people access to /home, where they can make branches (of anything in the system) and drop experiments and whatnot. And I give a smaller set of people (everyone in the commit group) access to the entire repository.

But I can't figure out any way to relax permissions on a subdirectory. It's driving me nuts. I even tried hacks like <Location ~ "/(every|path|but|home)"> with a Require group commit and <Location /> with Require valid-user, but it just allowed anyone to commit anywhere. Unlike RewriteRule it seems like Location doesn't allow the prefixing of regular expressions with ! to indicate negation (so I can't use <Location ~ "!^/home">).

Any ideas?