Updating Subversion in Centos 5.5

Interacting with modern Subversion repositories requires a modern copy. Centos 5.5, and other previous versions however, have rather old copies. My server reported (typed text underlined) --

# <span style="text-decoration: underline;">rpm -qa|grep subversion</span>
subversion-1.4.2-4.el5_3.1

The first step is to disable the yum-priorities plugin, if you are using it. If it exists, edit the file /etc/yum/pluginconf.d/priorities.conf and set enabled=0 -- you may want to change it back after you are done here.

Now let's see which subversion we have installed.

<code>  $ rpm -qa|grep subversion
    subversion-1.4.2-4.el5_3.1
</code>

Ah, right. Version 1.4.2 ... We want at least 1.5.

Install the rpmforge repository, following the CentOS instructions. There are the commands I used, you will want to verify the latest version.

# <span style="text-decoration: underline;">wget http://packages.sw.be/rpmforge-release/rpmforge-release-0.5.2-2.el5.rf.i386.rpm</span>
# <span style="text-decoration: underline;">rpm --import http://apt.sw.be/RPM-GPG-KEY.dag.txt</span>
# <span style="text-decoration: underline;">rpm -K rpmforge-release-0.5.2-2.el5.rf.*.rpm</span>
# <span style="text-decoration: underline;">rpm -i rpmforge-release-0.5.2-2.el5.rf.*.rpm</span>

RPMs that overwrite base CentOS modules have been removed from the main rpmforge repository, and put into the rpmforge-extras repository. Unfortunately that is disabled by default, and it is less than obvious how to enable it. The setting is in /etc/yum.repos.d/rpmforge.repo ... Look for this stanza and change the enabled line:

[rpmforge-extras]
name = RHEL $releasever - RPMforge.net - extras
baseurl = http://apt.sw.be/redhat/el5/en/$basearch/extras
mirrorlist = http://apt.sw.be/redhat/el5/en/mirrors-rpmforge-extras
#mirrorlist = file:///etc/yum.repos.d/mirrors-rpmforge-extras
<strong>enabled = 1</strong>
protect = 0
gpgkey = file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-rpmforge-dag
gpgcheck = 1

After this, you can just do a regular yum update or you can manually do just the one:

<pre style="padding-left: 30px;"><code>$ yum --enablerepo=rpmforge check-update subversion
subversion   </code>subversion-1.6.15-0.1.el5.rfx<code>         rpmforge
</code>