We were having a few problems with Subversion checkouts failing and it was suggested on the subversion mailing list that using the older version of APR included in Fedora Core 4 could be causing the problems. So we decided to upgrade to Fedora Core 6. I expected Subversion to work pretty much straight away, but I ran into a serious problem - the subversion binaries I built from source crashed Apache.

I then tried installing the FC6 RPMS for Subversion but they didn't work either.

This is what I found:

• My binaries were using an old version of APR which I had installed in /usr/local sometime ago. This was bad - so I removed them.
• The FC6 RPMS were using apr libraries which didn't exist in FC6. This is weird, they were linked against /usr/lib/libapr-0.so.0 when the apr RPM installed /usr/lib/libapr-1.so.0.
• Having removed my local version of apr I had to figure out how to build Subversion from source. I found that instead of specifying the directory containing apr and apr-utils (which is what I had been doing) that I should specify the config programs for each. This is the configure command I ended up using:
  

  ./configure --with-apxs=/usr/sbin/apxs --with-apr=/usr/bin/apr-1-config --with-apr-util=/usr/bin/apu-1-config

That got Subversion up and running.

I cannot understand why the FC6 Subversion RPMS didn't work. Either their dependencies are screwed up and there are some apr 0.* compatibility RPMS which I have missed or they simply don't work.