Nico Kadel-Garcia
2012-06-23 13:23:51 UTC
I've been busy, and was reminded at the SVNday conference in Berlin
recently that the Subversion for RHEL 4 is wildly out of date and
incompatible with RHEL 5 and RHEL 6's built-in versions.
My SRPM building toolkits for it are at:
https://github.com/nkadel/subversion-1.6.18-srpm
https://github.com/nkadel/subversion-1.7.5-srpm
The release notes for those vsrsions are at:
http://subversion.apache.org/docs/release-notes/1.6.html
http://subversion.apache.org/docs/release-notes/1.7.html
These work well in my testing on RHEL 4, 5, and 6, on i386 and x86_64.
They don't pass all the "make test" options on RHEL 4 and RHEL 5, but
as near as I can tell, it's because the Python on them is out of date
compared to what the Subversion test suite wants.
Subversion 1.6.18 is compatible with, though somewhat ahead of, the
1.6.11 supported by Red Hat in RHEL 5 and RHEL 6, so it should remain
in the "extras" repository along with Subversion 1.7.5. It provides a
compatible upgrade path for RHEL 4, 5, 6. It lacks some of the newer
features on RHEL 4 and RHEL 5, such as the incompatible Emacs modules,
bash completion, kwallet and gnome-keyring support, and Java utilities
on RHEL 4. Backporting those to RHEL 4 would be insanely difficult
and require upgrading KDE, Gnome, Python, etc., etc., etc. I am not
going there!
The Subversion built into RHEL 4 is 1.1.4, which is amazingly ou of
date and entirely unsupported by the Subversion community. So this is
a really, really useful update, and still a supported code base. In
particular, the syntax and handling of "svn:externals" has changed, so
Subverson projects that use the new syntax really, really, really need
the upgrade.
Subversion 1.7.5 is a major release upgrade, and the working copies it
creates are icompatible with the Subversion 1.6 on RHEL 5 and RHEL 6,
so it needs to be published and maintained separately. If I absolutely
*have* to, I'll publish a "subversion17-1.7.5" to allow parallel
deployment, but it's a lot of work that no one is paying me for, and I
really don't want to go there, the samba and samba3x package RHEL has
used have been really awkward at times.
Also note that, if you use Samba to access your home directory or a
project directory on your Windows boxes, the pupular Subversion
clients such as Subclipse and TortoiseSVN all use version Subversion
1.7, and your working copies will not work in Linux unless you upgrade
that Subversion to version 1.7 as well.
And by the way, Subversoin 1.8 is in the pipeline among the sore
Subversion committers, and that will again not be fully backwards
compatible with Subversoin 1.6 or 1.7, and they're planning on
dropping ongoing support for 1.6 after 1.8 comes out. This is
completely understandable, but it means thatif you want Subversion 1.7
or eventually 1.8, Repoforge will be your best bet to get the more
sophisticated features.
recently that the Subversion for RHEL 4 is wildly out of date and
incompatible with RHEL 5 and RHEL 6's built-in versions.
My SRPM building toolkits for it are at:
https://github.com/nkadel/subversion-1.6.18-srpm
https://github.com/nkadel/subversion-1.7.5-srpm
The release notes for those vsrsions are at:
http://subversion.apache.org/docs/release-notes/1.6.html
http://subversion.apache.org/docs/release-notes/1.7.html
These work well in my testing on RHEL 4, 5, and 6, on i386 and x86_64.
They don't pass all the "make test" options on RHEL 4 and RHEL 5, but
as near as I can tell, it's because the Python on them is out of date
compared to what the Subversion test suite wants.
Subversion 1.6.18 is compatible with, though somewhat ahead of, the
1.6.11 supported by Red Hat in RHEL 5 and RHEL 6, so it should remain
in the "extras" repository along with Subversion 1.7.5. It provides a
compatible upgrade path for RHEL 4, 5, 6. It lacks some of the newer
features on RHEL 4 and RHEL 5, such as the incompatible Emacs modules,
bash completion, kwallet and gnome-keyring support, and Java utilities
on RHEL 4. Backporting those to RHEL 4 would be insanely difficult
and require upgrading KDE, Gnome, Python, etc., etc., etc. I am not
going there!
The Subversion built into RHEL 4 is 1.1.4, which is amazingly ou of
date and entirely unsupported by the Subversion community. So this is
a really, really useful update, and still a supported code base. In
particular, the syntax and handling of "svn:externals" has changed, so
Subverson projects that use the new syntax really, really, really need
the upgrade.
Subversion 1.7.5 is a major release upgrade, and the working copies it
creates are icompatible with the Subversion 1.6 on RHEL 5 and RHEL 6,
so it needs to be published and maintained separately. If I absolutely
*have* to, I'll publish a "subversion17-1.7.5" to allow parallel
deployment, but it's a lot of work that no one is paying me for, and I
really don't want to go there, the samba and samba3x package RHEL has
used have been really awkward at times.
Also note that, if you use Samba to access your home directory or a
project directory on your Windows boxes, the pupular Subversion
clients such as Subclipse and TortoiseSVN all use version Subversion
1.7, and your working copies will not work in Linux unless you upgrade
that Subversion to version 1.7 as well.
And by the way, Subversoin 1.8 is in the pipeline among the sore
Subversion committers, and that will again not be fully backwards
compatible with Subversoin 1.6 or 1.7, and they're planning on
dropping ongoing support for 1.6 after 1.8 comes out. This is
completely understandable, but it means thatif you want Subversion 1.7
or eventually 1.8, Repoforge will be your best bet to get the more
sophisticated features.