"subversion requires zlib" problem and resolution

A cautionary tale about using system supplied Apache/APR/APR-UTIL RPMS, sent to
the list so that someone else won't lose hair over the problems I had...

I'm in the process of rebuilding my main dev machine after a failed system
upgrade and I got to the next step which was rebuilding Subversion. I
downloaded the 1.4.2 tarballs and unpacked both the main one and the deps one
into the same directory, then deleted apr/ and apr-util/, intending to use the
ones supplied with my distro (OpenSUSE 10.2). I went through the usual
incatations and got stopped cold by the error:

        subversion requires zlib

which made no sense. I checked, and sure enough zlib was installed. I unpacked
the deps again and installed the zlib portion manually. Still no happiness. I
checked to make sure that ldconfig had does the appropriate aliasing (which it had).

Finally, fed up with this, I actually read through the config.log and lo and
behold, the linker was failing to find mysqlclient_r when building the test
binary to make sure zlib included inflate! It seems that SUSE, in their
infinite wisdom, went and included mysql support in apr-util, and configure was
too daft to notice I hadn't installed mysql-dev (to get the mysql client libraries).

Once I installed mysql-dev, all was well with the world again, and I can
continue configuring my system. I don't think this is anything that the
Subversion project can direct address, short of smartening up configure to be
able to parse the actual error message from the linker, rather than just
throwing the next test error out for grins...

John

-- 
John Peacock
Director of Information Research and Technology
Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group
4501 Forbes Blvd
Suite H
Lanham, MD 20706
301-459-3366 x.5010
fax 301-429-5747
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