I'm not an Apache expert, use in infrequently, and rely on the docs quite a bit. I set up a fresh install and wanted to get UserDir's working, but had to seek the help from #apache IRC users to find out that I had to "chmod a+x" my /home/me directory so that I wouldn't get an Access Denied message when trying to access http://localhost/me/index.html because the "me" permissions were insufficient.
I think this is a regression, and not specific to UserDirs. I spent a couple of minutes figuring out I needed to +x my $HOME as I set my DocumentRoot to a dir there and my error.log just said: Permission denied: access to / denied I did a little googling and apparently this used to be the error message: Permission denied: access to / failed because search permissions are missing on a component of the path My apache version is 2.2.11
Moving docs bugs to docs@httpd.a.o ownership.
Not backporting as I don't want churn in this error message in 2.2, but it is fixed now in trunk (with the longer form of the 1.3 error message) http://svn.apache.org/viewvc?rev=1031307&view=rev