So I’ve been wanting to play with Subversion for awhile now. It looks great, I’ve skimmed the Subversion book, and I’m ready to rock. Getting and installing the subversion client has been no problem. There are binaries available and I’m pretty sure that I installed the subversion client from source. The major pain has been getting a local subversion server and repository set up.
I’ve never managed to make it past the complex (but well written) installation instructions. It involves some bleeding edge stuff that depends on some bleeding edge stuff. This installation from source complaint is probably one of the most common among newb Subversion users. I remember reading that there is a Debian meta-package under unstable called subversion-server. Installing a Subversion server should be as simple as apt-get install subversion-server, but I’ve not had a disposable Debian box kicking around nor enough free time to do a quick network install on something.
On to my Subversion DUH moment. I’ve got SUSE 9 installed on my laptop, which is with me pretty much all the time. I was vaguely familiar that there were binary packages available somewhere (linked directly from the Subversion site of course), but had kind of written them off as being client binaries only.
They’re so not. This directory at suse.com has freaking everything I need to get started including an RPM for Subversion server.
The binaries currenlty lag behind the 1.0 source release, but should be up to speed real soon now. I’ll probably wait until the binaries reflect the 1.0 release, but once they do, *BAM* I’m going to start mucking around with Subversion, no painful install from source neccesary.
Mad props to Olaf Hering at SUSE for maintaining a binary release for SUSE Linux. By the way, there are packages for 9, 8.2, 8.1, 8 PPC, and UnitedLinux x86-64.