Description of problem: After a recent update of some rpms, subversion stopped working. Turns out that the update included modsecurity that I didn't have before, and it sounds like making it work with svn takes work. I don't mind these problems (I'll probably just disable it), but it sounds like a bad idea to automatically install stuff for people that breaks svn.
I'm not following you here. mod_security is not an essential package and no other packages in Fedora are dependent on it's presence - it's an entirely optional package. What commands / RPMs did you use that caused it to be pulled in? Neither I nor any other packager (to my knowledge) have mandated mod_security as part of a general update. I also noticed that you've not included any logs or means of repeating this issue (ie. which rule has tripped up SVN, taken from modsec_audit.log et. al). You might also wish to check the mailing lists @ www.modsecurity.org as I'm certain this has come up there before now.
I don't know how it got in, I didn't keep track of things. All I know is that I didn't use to have it (and svn worked fine) before that update, and did had it afterwards. So, since I don't have any additional information, feel free to close this bug. Alternatively, if you know of some place where yum updates are logged (with the dependency information that has lead to additional packages), then tell me and I'll grep for the reason I got it, or send it over here.
If you can't provide further information (/var/log/yum.log will list what packages have been installed on update but not show a full dependency tree) I will certainly close this bug. When you can verify that there is a real, repeatable issue reopen this bug (or log a new one) supplying the info from yum/modsec_audit.log files respectively. I am not psychic but I strongly suspect user error here.