Background: I am a longtime Gentoo user, and this is my first time using Ubuntu (installed on a VM to avoid compiling everything from scratch). I am familiar with a Linux environment but somewhat unfamiliar with Ubuntu.

I am trying to install Subversion 1.7 on Ubuntu and saw this post: Where can I find a Subversion 1.7 binary?

The above post recommends using the PPA ppa:dominik-stadler/subversion-1.7. I also found the PPA ppa:svn/ppa from another link. They both cause problems for me.

The issue is that any svn operation using the remote server causes the following error:

svn: E170001: Unable to connect to a repository at URL 'svn+ssh://my_repo'
svn: E170001: Could not create SASL context: generic failure: No such file or directory

This seems to arise from a recent bug involving SVN dependency on the libsasl library, as documented by Debian users here: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=683555

and also Mac users here: https://trac.macports.org/ticket/34861

Resolution seems to involve either updating the cyrus-sasl or libsasl library to a newer version (neither of which is in the latest apt packages), or compiling subversion without SASL support. As a Gentoo user I started looking into how to compile svn from source, but it looks way more complicated on Ubuntu than I'm used to and I'm not sure what the canonical way is. My questions:

• Is there an obvious fix for this problem that I am overlooking?
• Is there a way to update the dependencies for SVN to something that works through using synaptic or apt-get?
• If I want to compile from scratch, how do I use the sources in the PPA instead of downloading my own source copy (i.e. the PPA has both binary and sources?)