by Jörg Jooss
10. August 2005 08:02
Since my current project requires a Subversion client on AIX 5.3, and there are no binary distributions available for this platform, I decided to give it a shot today. My expectations weren't exactly high… I had read through the Subversion users' mailing list archive, and it seemed as though AIX and Subversion were not really your RCS dream team. But low expectations can hardly be not met, so I grabbed the 1.2.1 tarball, unpacked it and typed the fateful word ./configure.
1st interlude: The good news is that the Subversion package is pretty much self-contained. You'll need an extra installation of Berkeley DB if you want to build a server with a BDB backend, but if you just need the client or if FSFS is your preferred backend (it's mine for sure), that single tarball is all you'll ever need.
2nd interlude: The bad news is that Subversion's configure checks, checks again and double checks your system for C compilers, FORTRAN compilers (excuse me 
), BDB installations, and arcane UNIX tools that it takes ages to finish. I don't know how many CPUs I had available (probably just one due to micro-partitioning), but it took three and a half hours to spit out the Makefile. Yes, there are tons of switches you can pass to configure that will skip certain steps and thus speed up the process, but if you follow the INSTALL file's instructions in quick start mode, you're going to miss them…
The actual build then went pretty fast, I guess less than 30 minutes using IBM's AIX C compiler. And the build didn't fail! Lo and behold, svn even worked right away.
Morale of the story:
- Binary distributions are for wimps.
- Any build tool not called
make is for wimps.
- The euphoria doesn't wear off even hours later.
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