I’ve heard a few harsh words about Subversion before. Mostly these came from sysadmins who complained about all bits and pieces Subversion requires to work properly. Some mentioned that it is not trivial to compile with the set of options that is different from the default.
Today I spent about three hours together with The Master of Strace trying to make Subversion command line client svn work on one of our old machines that runs Red Hat Linux 6.2. The only way to success, it seems, was to compile the static version of svn. Since we needed support for https:// URLs, we had to build with OpenSSL. OpenSSL is not trivial to compile statically too, because of it enourmous love of Kerberos5. While trying to make it work we also jumped through a number of versions of Subversion and other components.
Finally, we managed to build everything. In case you’ll ever need a statically compiled version of svn (from Subversion version 0.17.1 (r4503)), you can get it here (the binary is about 7 MB):
As far as I am concerned it works just fine. It runs on Red Hat Linux 6.2 and can work (import, checkout, commit, etc) with repository running on one of the recent versions (1.1.4 if I recall correctly).
Needless to say that today I’ve heard a few more not-for-kids-ears words and phrases towards Subversion developers.