The following series of events were carried out on CentOS 5 and were a success. If you are using a RedHat based systems such as CentOS or Fedora, the following series of instructions should allow you to upgrade svn in the same way.

Please note you must investigate your own server settings and in no way should you make any changes to your systems suggested here unless you are 100% confident that these changes will not result in problems to your system.

Recently I ran into a problem when using TortoiseSVN and the command line on CentOS. It appeared that after upgrading my version of tortoise I was being presented with errors on the command line when trying to run simple svn commands. Further investigation revealed that I was using an older version of svn on my server which was resulting in conflicts between my server and tortoise when quering the same repository. So I decided to record the procedure I went through to upgrade my version of svn and share it here. The most recent version of svn was which was 1.6 at the time of writing.

1. Run ’svn –version’ on the command line to confirm that you running an older version of svn than 1.6. In my case his revealed : ’svn, version 1.4.6′. Upgrade needed.
2. Check that YUM doesn’t have the version you require using the by running ‘YUM upgrade subversion’. In my case I received the response ‘No Packages marked for Update’.
3. Make sure you have priorities installed by running ‘YUM install yum-priorities’
4. Ensure that the priorities plugin is enabled by editing : ‘/etc/yum/plugincont.d/priorities.conf’. Then set ‘[main] enabled = 1′.
5. Edit the .repo files in ‘/etc/yum.repos.d/*’ by adding ‘priority=N’ where N is 1 to 99 depending on your system.

Priorities that I used :

• Base, add-ons, updates, extras = 1
• CentOS plus, contrib = 2
• 3^rd party repos such as RPMForge = N (Where N >=10)

6. Download the RPM release package from : ‘http://apt.sw.be/redhat/el5/en/x86_64/RPMS.dag/rpmforge-release-0.3.6-1.el5.rf.x86_64.rpm‘
7. Install DAGS GPG Key ‘rpm –import http://dag.wieers.com/rpm/packages/RPM-GPG-KEY.dag.txt‘
8. Verify the package download by running ‘rpm -K rpmforge-release-0.3.6-1.el5.rf.x86_64.rpm‘
9. If the package is verified, install the package ‘rpm -i rpmforge-release-0.3.6-1.el5.rf.x86_64.rpm
10. Test that the package installed by running ‘yum check-update’. Look for ‘loading priority plugin’ and ‘excluded packages’ due to the priorities plugin being present.
11. Add the following to the [base] and [update] sections of the centos.repo files in /etc/yum.repos.d/ (You may wish to add this to other 3^rd party files in this directory as well):
    ‘exclude=subversion’.
12. Now yum will behave as if there’s no package named subversion in the core repositories and will install the latest ‘1.6′ from RpmForge.
13. Run ‘yum install subversion’ and you should now see the latest subversion being installed. After which you can run ’svn –version’ just to be sure.

Now you should have the latest version of subversion on your system.