Don't forget Neon when building Subversion

If you built Subversion from source and can't access WebDAV repositories (those which start with http://), then this might be your problem. This one was bitter enough. Installed Subversion from source on tthe MacBook, but didn't bother looking at the output of the ./configure. After grappling with why I couldn't checkout from web repositories, it turned out that neon hadn't been installed. You need Neon to implement RA-DAV (Repository Access Using HTTP/DAV). It turned out that we had installed Subversion which could access local repositories (RA-Local) using the file://localhost/path/to/repos or file://path/to/repos notation and with SVN using the svn:// notation, but not with the ubiquitous http::// (WebDAV) notation. This is what the ./configure command spat out and what should have been observed: configure: checking neon library checking for neon-config... /usr/local/bin/neon-config checking neon library version... 0.26.3 You have neon version 0.26.3, but Subversion needs neon 0.25.5. An appropriate version of neon could not be found, so libsvn_ra_dav will not be built. If you want to build libsvn_ra_dav, please either install neon 0.25.5 on this system or get neon 0.25.5 from: http://www.webdav.org/neon/neon-0.25.5.tar.gz unpack the archive using tar/gunzip and rename the resulting directory from ./neon-0.25.5/ to ./neon/ no suitable neon found P.S. The newer version of neon was there from a few minutes previous. I had fiddled with installing it. As we say, "ein chacham k'ba'al hanisiyon". You're smarter through experience.