OS X client frustrations

All:

I'm a bit frustrated with trying to get a user of my subversion server
a working client. He's on 10.2.6, I'm on 10.3.2.

I built my client from source. I cannot just ship it to him for two
reasons:

1) The large number of dependancies on dynamic libraries.
2) Even if I ship him all the required dynamic libraries, it's not
going to work, since on 10.3 you end up with a dependancy on
libiconv.dylib, which does not exist on 10.2.

So, I thought....we'll just use fink.

For starters, the current procedure for getting subversion out of fink
is *way* too hard for normal users. You have to edit your fink config
(using sudo) add the unstable branch, and update your fink
installation.

But, assuming you get that far and tell fink to install svn-client, you
get:

Failed: Can't resolve dependency "system-java14-dev" for package
"svn-1.0.0-12" (no matching packages/versions found)

sure enough, the package system-java14-dev does not exist.

(I realize this is an issue for the fink maintainers, but I thought the
subversion folks needed to be aware)

So, I next started down the path of trying to compile subversion as
10.2-compatible. It's easy to get gcc to do that, but unfortunately,
configure knows its running on 10.3 and finds things in the 10.3
headers that don't exist in the 10.2 headers. Thus., when you're
compiling against the 10.2 headers, you get errors.

(Granted, I understand that Apple caused this issue by having
incompatible headers)

So, I'm curious to hear the thoughts of those maintaining subversion
for OS X, or others that have solved this issue. I've got the server
built and ready - all I want to do is send my 10.2 user a svn client
that will work.

I guess I'm down to the point of having to talk him through downloading
the tarball and compiling it for himself on 10.2, but I really didn't
want to go there.

Thoughts?

Wade
Received on Wed Mar 10 18:31:30 2004