My current project at Yahoo! is using a Subversion repository for version control, as opposed to the usual CVS (thankfully). Unfortunately, it turns out that the svn client installed on Mac OS X Leopard up to and including 10.5.6, is 1.4 whereas the “best” release is 1.5.

It’s very simple to get the newer 1.5 version up and running by compiling from source:

• Download the source code from subversion: Documents & files: Source code
• Unpack the source code and enter the subversion-1.5.x directory
• ./configure --without-sasl
• make
• sudo make install

This will install Subversion 1.5 in your /usr/local path.

I added the --without-sasl option to prevent the following error from occurring when committing files:

svn: Commit failed (details follow):
svn: Cannot negotiate authentication mechanism