Building Subversion (SVN) 1.4.2 on Mac OS X

Today I needed to install Subversion on my Macbook running OS X and was following Dan Benjamin's excellent instructions for accomplishing this task. The main difference was that I wanted to install the latest and greatest (as of today) version of Subversion, which is 1.4.2. Dan's instructions covered 1.3.1 and a co-worker was able to install SVN just fine using those instructions and the older version. I started following the instructions, substituting 1.4.2 for 1.3.1. Everything was going nicely until the configure, at which point I received an error stating "no suitable apr found". The following is the full output.

configure: Configuring Subversion 1.4.2
configure: creating config.nice
checking for gcc... gcc
checking for C compiler default output file name... a.out
checking whether the C compiler works... yes
checking whether we are cross compiling... no
checking for suffix of executables... 
checking for suffix of object files... o
checking whether we are using the GNU C compiler... yes
checking whether gcc accepts -g... yes
checking for gcc option to accept ANSI C... none needed
checking how to run the C preprocessor... gcc -E
checking build system type... i386-apple-darwin8.8.1
checking host system type... i386-apple-darwin8.8.1
checking target system type... i386-apple-darwin8.8.1
checking for egrep... grep -E
checking whether ln -s works... yes
checking for a BSD-compatible install... /usr/bin/install -c
checking for static Apache module support... no
checking for Apache module support via DSO through APXS... no - Unable to locate /usr/include/httpd/mod_dav.h
==================================================================
WARNING: skipping the build of mod_dav_svn
         --with-apxs or --with-apache must be used
==================================================================
configure: Apache Portable Runtime (APR) library configuration
checking for APR... no
configure: WARNING: APR not found
The Apache Portable Runtime (APR) library cannot be found.
Please install APR on this system and supply the appropriate
--with-apr option to 'configure'

or

get it with SVN and put it in a subdirectory of this source:

   svn co \
    http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/apr/apr/branches/0.9.x \
    apr

Run that right here in the top level of the Subversion tree,
then run autogen.sh again.

Whichever of the above you do, you probably need to do
something similar for apr-util, either providing both
--with-apr and --with-apr-util to 'configure', or
getting both from SVN with:

   svn co \
    http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/apr/apr-util/branches/0.9.x \
    apr-util

configure: error: no suitable apr found

Oops.

I searched around Google a bit to see if anyone else had encountered (and solved) this problem. Didn't find much so I decided to go ahead and follow the suggestion to install Apache Portable Runtime and then try the configuration again. In case you run into the same problem, here are the modified instructions I used to build SVN 1.4.2 for OS X. Thanks to Dan for the original instructions, and I hope the modified ones will help you out too. Admittedly I did not think too much about exactly why I needed apr and was interested in just getting it to work. So if I've done something stupid by installing apr please feel free to post a comment and let me know!

One last note is that the following commands contain my username, sleberkn, so of course you'll need to substitute your username, or follow Jason's suggestion to use $HOME instead. Before just trying these commands, first read Dan's entire post so you have all the prerequisites, such as setting your PATH correctly!

cd ~/Desktop
mkdir src
cd src
curl -O http://subversion.tigris.org/downloads/subversion-1.4.2.tar.gz
tar xzvf subversion-1.4.2.tar.gz
curl -O http://mirrors.24-7-solutions.net/pub/apache/apr/apr-1.2.7.tar.gz
tar xvzf apr-1.2.7.tar.gz
curl -O http://mirrors.24-7-solutions.net/pub/apache/apr/apr-util-1.2.7.tar.gz
tar xvzf apr-util-1.2.7.tar.gz
cd apr-1.2.7
./configure --prefix=/Users/sleberkn/Desktop/src/subversion-1.4.2
make
make install
cd ..
cd apr-util-1.2.7
./configure --prefix=/Users/sleberkn/Desktop/src/subversion-1.4.2 --with-apr=/Users/sleberkn/Desktop/src/subversion-1.4.2
make
make install
cd ..
cd subversion-1.4.2
./configure --prefix=/usr/local --with-openssl --with-ssl --with-zlib --with-apr=/Users/sleberkn/Desktop/src/subversion-1.4.2 --with-apr-util=/Users/sleberkn/Desktop/src/subversion-1.4.2
make
sudo make install

Assuming all that worked, verify your installation.

which svn
svn --version

The output from the above commands should show the Subversion is installed in /usr/local/bin. My output looked like this.

nic-sleberkn:~/Desktop/src/subversion-1.4.2 sleberkn$ which svn
/usr/local/bin/svn
nic-sleberkn:~/Desktop/src/subversion-1.4.2 sleberkn$ svn --version
svn, version 1.4.2 (r22196)
   compiled Nov 30 2006, 17:47:45

Copyright (C) 2000-2006 CollabNet.
Subversion is open source software, see http://subversion.tigris.org/
This product includes software developed by CollabNet (http://www.Collab.Net/).

The following repository access (RA) modules are available:

* ra_svn : Module for accessing a repository using the svn network protocol.
  - handles 'svn' scheme
* ra_local : Module for accessing a repository on local disk.
  - handles 'file' scheme