Very non-intuitive error message from SVN

I just got the following error message out of Subversion (on the command line under Linux):


sh: ./svn-commit.tmp: Permission denied
svn: Commit failed (details follow):
svn: system(' svn-commit.tmp') returned 32256


It sounds like a file permission problem, but I couldn't find any problems - I was working in my own directory that I checked out of SVN. I ran strace to see what was going on, and right about the time that the Shinola hit the fan, I could see that it was trying to fire up an editor for the check-in comment. I looked, and I did not have the EDITOR environment variable set. Once I set it, it worked fine.

Let's see, "Permisssion denied" means that an environment variable was not set. Sure, that makes sense - NOT.

enjoy,
Charles.