apr fails to configure when building subversion

Question

I am trying to build subversion 1.7.4 on my ReadyNas Duo, it's a Sparc box running Debian with a couple of disks in it I use as my NAS.

When i do a ./configure --prefix /c/local/packages from my subversion-1.7.4 directory I get configure: error: No XML parser found! Please specify --with-expat or --with-libxml2

apr is failing to configure, says it can find libxml2 -- which is there /usr/lib/limxml2.so, I've also done an apt-get install libxml2-dev

The thing is so dog slow it takes ages to fail, I would use a binary dist but the eclipse plug in didn't want to play with it because it was too old...

any ideas?

Answer 1

The trick was to cd into the apr directory in the subversion source directory and do a ./configure --with-libxml2=/usr/lib before returning to the subversion source directory and running ./configure from there again.

Not the last problem encountered for anyone wishing to build the latest subversion on a ReadyNAS Duo

Answer 2

I just happened to have finished building Subversion 1.7.4 on Redhat REL-5.3. I had to update everything. The system came with Subversion 1.3.x. Why our company can't use anything newer than a 5.3 is a mystery to me.

If you want to use Apache httpd as your server, you might have to rebuild Apache, so you can build the required mod_dav_svn.o Apache module. See if this module is already located inside your Apache module directories. (On most Linux systems, it's a link from /etc/httpd/modules.)

Be very careful about parsing through the output of your configure script. For example, out of hundreds of line, I found a reference that neon wasn't found. No neon, no http access from Subversion.

Here's a list of modules I downloaded:

• apr
• apr-util
• autoconf-2.68 (I think this was for Apache)
• neon-0.29.6
• prce-8.20 (for Apache for mod_perl.o not really necessary)
• sqlite-amalgamoation-3071000 (had to replace sqlite3.c in SVN source)
• Apache's httd-2.4.1

And to build Subversion, I had to download a patch in order to build mod_dav_svn.

If I remember, I had to set -with-apr and --with-aprutil pointing to the apr-1-util and apu-1-util files. Everything installed in /usr/local without me having to specify a directory. Didn't run into an expat issue. However, I have libexpat.so.0.5.0 installed on my system under the /lib directory with a link from /usr/lib.

Hope this helps.