Installing Subversion from source on CentOS 5.2

Okay so this not strictly BI related but hey, most of us BI types have a slight geek inclination don't we, or is that just me?

I guess the main reason for blogging about this is that I really didn't expect this to be that hard. I mean, I've been installing Subversion from source since about Fedora Core 3 without issues (other than when the Subversion/Berkley DB integration underwent some changes that shafted access to my repositories) so I kinda expected the same here. Um, wrong! At least this time the issue related to a fresh install rather than suddenly finding that I can no longer access my repositories. Needless to say I now use FSFS rather than Berkley DB as the back-end but still. A friend of mine also works on FSFS (see: http://www.farside.org.uk/200704/tree_structured_fsfs) so he'd been going on at me for a while to switch. Still took that heartache to make me use FSFS though, groan...

Anyway, so a while back (meant to blog about this a long time ago but based on how long it has been since my last blog, I can see that it really was a loooong time ago) I set about compiling Subversion from source code. I guess there are many reasons for installing Subversion from source code but that's immaterial here. Needless to say that I started and soon came to realise after running ./configure that there were some missing dependencies when trying to enable SSL. After a little bit of searching and running rpm -qa etc. to find if certain libraries were installed I found that my install of CentOS was missing the openssl-devel library. So, a quick install using yum and I was away, or was I?

Okay, so maybe not. After installing the missing library another error occurred during the ./configure script run. This particular issue, however, is documented in the Subversion documentation and requires you to amend the parameters passed to the configure command in order to have the information passed through to the "sub-configure" scripts. Rather bizarrely you need to specify the --with-libs parameter, specifying "/usr/kerberos" as the value. (i.e. --with-libs=/usr/kerberos)

I guess the part that really got me for a while was the fact that when you run the configure script, passing in the above mentioned switch, a message is generated on the first line stating: "configure: WARNING: unrecognized options: --with-libs" however this message can be safely ignored. That little tidbit of information is not specified in the documentaion. So, if you leave the script to run it should actually run to completion, barring any other issues naturally.

Long and short of it is that in order to compile Subversion with SSL enabled on CentOS 5.2 (well with the my install base anyway) I had to do the following:

# Unpack the source
tar -zxvf subversion-<version>.tar.gz
cd subversion-<version>
# Check that openssl-devel has been installed.
yum list openssl-devel
# If not, install using the following:
yum install openssl-devel
# Configure and install subversion with FSFS,
# ignoring message "configure: WARNING:
# unrecognized options: --with-libs".
./configure --without-berkeley-db --with-ssl --with-libs=/usr/kerberos

And that's all there is to it!