Installing Subversion on Unix machine

svntarunix

I'm new to unix and trying to create a guide for users to install subversion. I've found a tutorial about how to build from a tarball. I'm ready to try it out, but I don't know how to download the file from the command line from a web address. Can someone please provide the command I would need, and also which directory I should do it from? What does unpack it mean? Generally translate these instructions like I'm an 8 year old. Thanks:

Download the most recent distribution tarball from:

      http://subversion.apache.org/download/

  Unpack it, and use the standard GNU procedure to compile:

      $ ./configure
      $ make
      # make install

  You can also run the full test suite by running 'make check'.

Best Answer

First of all, if you are on a unix host with a package manager: Use that and skip the rest.

Read on if you do need to build it manually:

Download the most recent distribution tarball from: http://subversion.apache.org/download/

Go to that webpage and download the tarball. You can open that webpage in a graphical browser such as firefox to get a nice display, or you can use a text based browser such as lynx, links or w3m to see the page.

On that page is a link to subversion-1.7.9.tar.gz. Download that file and save it somewhere. How you do this depends on the browser used. Usually it is just hoovering your mosye pointer over it and clicking on that link (graphical) or using the cursor keys to navigate to it and press Enter and 'save as' (most text browsers).

Once you know the URL you can also download it with
wget http://apache.mirror.1000mbps.com/subversion/subversion-1.7.9.tar.gz


Unpack it, and use the standard GNU procedure to compile:

Unpacking the downloaded file is easy. If it was a zip then you would use unzip subversion-1.7.9.zip. In this case it is a .tar.gz and you use tar xzf subversion-1.7.9.tar.gz. (Tar, eXtract, gZipcompressed File).

That will leave you with a directory with all the files you need.


In this directory type ./configure


This will start the command configure in the current directory, which will configure things for you.

Then type make. This will compile the program using the recipe found in a file called Makefile.


Finally, switch to a user with sufficient rights to install package (e.g. root, the unix version of admin) and make install. This will install the software.

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