Re: Subversion, decentralized version control, and the future.

[Karl Fogel]
> I forget the dependency burden, having taken care of my own set up
> many years ago (haven't had to think about it much since then).

For any prospective developer reading this who is wondering about
installing dependencies, note that it _can_ be a pretty simple process:

1. Find a recent Debian or Ubuntu installation CD and install the OS.
2. Log in as root and install stuff:

   # aptitude install build-essential subversion emacs21
   # apt-get build-dep subversion

   (The "emacs21" is not strictly necessary, but if you're going to
   hack on Subversion, you will need a good text editor.)

This should get you most of the way there. There are details such as
the fact that Subversion uses a rather underhanded way to detect and
use Berkeley DB, which won't work with Debian's apr-util (a trivial
patch is at [0], but I'm not sure if it's suitable for non-Debian use).
Another detail is that the Debian package 'libserf-0-0-dev', which is
needed for building libsvn_ra_serf, is only available in unreleased OS
versions: Debian lenny or Ubuntu gusty/Universe.

   [0] svn://svn.debian.org/pkg-subversion/trunk/debian/patches/fix-bdb-version-detection

I mention all this for information, not to contradict what others have
said about setting up a build environment. Certainly it is not this
simple on all OSes.

-- 
Peter Samuelson | org-tld!p12n!peter | http://p12n.org/