The Subversion team released version 1.5 recently, with some really tight features such as changelist and merge tracking.

In our shop we standardized on Debian, and it's very likely going to take till 5.0 (lenny) until we get access. Normally I would just do a compile from source, but since this will have to be done on multiple servers, I decided to backport subversion from Lenny to create a nice little .deb package.

Here are my steps, (tested on just my machine, so please try at your own risk).

1. We'll start off by creating a directory for this process.
   ``` mkdir subversion ```
2. Next, download the source packages from the debian packages site.. They're on the right.
3. Now, unzip them.
   ``` gunzip subversion_1.5.0dfsg1-4.diff.gz tar xfvz subversion_1.5.0dfsg1.orig.tar.gz ```
4. The first file was patch with debian specific changes, we'll need to apply this patch to the source tree.
   ``` patch -p0 < subversion_1.5.0dfsg1-4.diff ```
5. Enter the source directory
   ``` cd subversion-1.5.0dfsg1/ ```
6. We'll need to change some file permissions to make this work.
   ``` chmod 755 debian/rules ```
7. Now we switch to the root user, because we need to install some dependencies.
   ``` # Assuming you're root apt-get build-dep subversion apt-get install python-all-dev libneon26-dev quilt libsasl2-dev fakeroot debhelper ```
8. Switch back from root to your normal user.
9. I've had some issues making creating the java hooks. To get around this, we'll need to disable them. Do this by opening the 'debian/rules' file and change the line that says 'ENABLE_JAVAHL' to no. For me this was on line 21.
   ``` ENABLE_JAVAHL := no ```
10. Now we can get started building the package.
    ``` dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot -uc -b -d ```
    
11. 
12. If everything went well, you should have ended up with about 10 .deb packages in the directory right above the source directory. You can simply install all of them with:
    ``` dpkg -i *.deb ```
</ol>