Last night and today I've been wrestling with getting subversion 0.36 to build on Mac OS X. I was unhappy with the Fink guys because their version is so far behind, but after my experiences, I understand a bit more where they are coming from.

To build subversion (svn), you need Berkeley DB (BDB) 4.2.50, Neon 0.24, httpd 2.0.48, and subversion-0.36. Getting the tarballs and unpacking them is no problem. I built Neon and BDB according to the instructions and set them aside. No problem. Next up, build httpd 2.0.48 against BDB 4.2.50 so that httpd and subversion both use the same BDB (subversion needs BDB 4.2). I got stuck here for quite a while. First, the httpd build wasn't finding BDB. This was partially fixed by Justin Erenkrantz who pointed me to a newer version of httpd-2.0.48/srclib/apr-util/build/dbm.m4 (I got version 1.8). This got me further not quite all the way. I made a typo in the pathe for BDB which was just dumb. But it took a couple builds to find it (thanks to Jack Repenning). The next obstacle was that httpd built, but subversion wasn't finding it or SSL. When I tried to run apachectl. It failed with an error about expat libraries being incorrect versions. I was trying to build all of the httpd modules as shared, which may have been the problem. So throttled back to enabling just the modules described in the svn INSTALL file. This still didn't produce a working apachectl. As a last act of desperation, I blew away the httpd directory and unpacked the tarball again, copied the new version of dbm.m4 and configured. And lo and behold httpd built and apachectl ran. Of course, I'm missing a bunch of modules that I want -- I guess I'll be learning how to build individual modules as DSO's (yes I did try to build all the modules non-shared. subversion didn't like that either).

Working httpd in hand, I then proceeded on to try and build svn clients and servers. After the first attempt at configuring, I saw that subversion actually builds neon itself. So much for the original build of neon. The problem was that neon wasn't getting built with SSL support. So I went looking through the mailing lists (again) for some kind of pointers. Fortunately, this message mentioned the --with-libs= option for neon, which resulted in subversion configuring correctly. The compile just finished and everything seems good. I can't guarantee that it runs, but that's next on my list.

If you've been keeping score, and you want to try this at home (assuming you've unpacked the tarballs):

cd db-4.2.50
cd build_unix
../dist/configure
make
sudo make install
cd ..
cp dbm.m4 httpd-2.0.48  (you have to get the path for dbm.m4 right after you download it)
cd httpd-2.0.48
./configure --enable-dav --enable-so --enable-maintainer-mode --enable-ssl --with-berkeley-db=/usr/local/BerkeleyDB.4.2
make
sudo make install
cd ..
cd subversion-0.36.0
./autogen.sh
./configure --enable-maintainer-mode --enable-ssl --with-ssl --with-libs=/sw/lib --with-berkeley-db=/usr/local/BerkeleyDB.4.2
make
sudo make install