techblog 

We use the excellent Subversion for our source control here at Nominet. The latest version (1.4) apparently has huge performance improvements for certain client-side operations. I believe this is because the metadata that it stores in your working copy has changed. This also means that previous versions of Subversion would not understand working copies created by version 1.4. This included the integration with my favoured Java IDE, IntelliJ IDEA until the version just released.

So it seemed like now would be the perfect opportunity to upgrade Subversion to take advantage of these improvements. I run Mac OS X which means there are two ways to install Subversion. Either as a prebuilt binary or via the package management system Fink. Unfortunately there is no prebuilt binary available beyond version 1.3.1, so that means I’m forced to use Fink.

The page for the subversion client shows that I should be able to get 1.4.2-10 via CVS or rsync source but not via binary distribution. But quite how you do this is a bit of a mystery. Something in the fink man pages suggests that in order to get such source distributions I have to self-update Fink itself via rsync. When I do this it tells me that I need to completely reinstall Fink itself because I am apparently running the “10.4-transitional” Tree. Aaaaaagh!

I thought the point of a package management system was that it insulated you from all of this kind of tinkering. I’m only trying to install the latest, stable version of a well known software tool. I’m not trying to hack the kernel of my machine….

Update: I now have managed to install it.  But only once I’d installed the latest version of XCode, reinstalled fink from scratch, self-updated it and installed the subversion client (which seemed to build every imaginable library from source).  Not bad for a morning’s work!