The Subversion development team recently released version 1.4 of the Subversion client and server, which includes some handy improvements.

• `svn diff` can now optionally ignore whitespace and differences between platform end of line styles when computing the difference between files.
• OS X Keychain (OS X’s password store) support.
• Significant working-copy performance improvements.
• File size improvements when working with binary files.
• A handful of new command line options.
• More than 40 bugfixes.

It’s important to note that the Subversion development team warns that the working copy storage format, i.e. the “.svn” folders, has changed for 1.4, so if you are doing something along the lines of reading a working copy stored on an external drive from two different computers, both will need to be updated to Subversion 1.4. This limitation does not extend to clients using a server-side repository.

Most of our development these days happens on Macs, some G4 and some Intel. Either way, Metissian, the source for OS X binary builds of Subversion, hasn’t released new builds of 1.4 yet. I built my own copy of 1.4 using Dan Benjamin’s building instructions for Subversion on OS X for a PowerBook G4, simply substituting downloading the 1.4 release instead of 1.3.1.

However, recently I’ve transitioned to a shiny new MacBook Pro. When I went to use the same instructions to build Subversion 1.4, the configure step complained that I was missing the Apache Portable Runtime, a dependency of Subversion’s. Starting with Subversion 1.4, the Subversion team is distributing the dependencies separately form the Subversion source code. Once you download both Subversion 1.4.0 and its dependencies and extract them both to the same folder, Dan Benjamin’s original instructions work seamlessly.