How to install subversion on a facilitized Red Hat 9 machine

So you want to replace the ancient subversion on your machine with a current version? The RPMs for the current subversion can be found here (linked from the official subversion site). You need at least the following RPMs:

apr-0.9.5-0.2.i386.rpm
apr-util-0.9.5-0.1.i386.rpm
neon-0.24.7-1.i386.rpm
subversion-1.0.6-1.rh90.i386.rpm

So you downloaded these RPMs and installed them. That was easy, right? It turns out that this is not enough on an SCS-facilitized machine. The reason is that RH9 packages are built with NPTL enabled, including the db4 packages needed by subversion. However, the facilitized kernel does not support NPTL. Therefore, when you run "svn create <repo>", you get: 

svn: Berkeley DB error while creating environment for filesystem <repo>/db:
Function not implemented
Of course, you can run the RH9 kernel to avoid this problem, but then you can't use AFS.

One better solution (as described here) is to rebuild the db4 packages with NPTL disabled. Here are the packages I built:

db4-4.0.14-20_nonptl.i386.rpm
db4-devel-4.0.14-20_nonptl.i386.rpm
db4-java-4.0.14-20_nonptl.i386.rpm
db4-utils-4.0.14-20_nonptl.i386.rpm

If you want to build them yourself, you may first need to install autoconf, automake, and libtool, depending on your current configuration. Then download the db4 SRPM from any Red Hat mirror, and use my spec file (or patch the original spec file using this patch) to build the packages.

Update the installed db4 packages with the nonptl ones. Now you can create the subversion repository!

Last modified: Thu Sep 16 11:31:49 EDT 2004 using Vim
by pach at cs.cmu.edu