Upgrading Subversion to 1.5 on CentOS 5.2 Using Yum

Default CentOS 5.2 yum repositories are still on Sybversion 1.4.x branch, so if you need the latest Subversion client, you are out of luck... or not, if you read this blog post :) This quick tutorial will show you how to upgrade in less than 5 minutes.

We will use RPMForge repos for the upgrade.

• Download and install proper RPMForge repo RPM for your server architecture (64bit or 32bit) from RPMForge website.
• Edit /etc/yum.repos.d/rpmforge.repo and change enabled=1 to "0". We do not want this repo to be enabled by default, because an accidental "svn update" will update all your packages to bleeding-edge, test-quality versions. RPMForge has many experimental rpms.
• Run: yum --enablerepo=rpmforge check-update subversion and make sure the version of subversion you are looking for is available. It should show you something like:
  

  rpmforge 100% |=========================| 1.1 kB  00:00     
  subversion.x86_64    1.5.5-0.1.el5.rf  rpmforge       
  

• Check for existing subversion clients:

  # rpm -qa | grep -i subversion
  subversion-1.4.2-2.el5
  subversion-1.4.2-2.el5
  

• Apparently there're two rpms installed (happens sometimes) so we need to add special flag to rpm -evf to safely remove it:

  rpm -evf --allmatches subversion-1.4.2-2.el5
  

• Obviously, in your case there may not be previous installation or the version may be different.

• Run install:
  

  yum --enablerepo=rpmforge --disablerepo=base install subversion
  

  Please note that we are enabling rpmforge repo and disabling "base" repo that has 1.4.x version of Subversion, since yum would try to install it, as well. If yum finds other repos with 1.4.x, you may need to disable them as well.

  cheers