[Openmcl-devel] svn change

[Gary Byers]

We'd like to make a fairly obscure change to the way that CCL is organized/packaged
in subversion in the next few days.  (For the curious, the change involves using
relative URLs in "svn externals" properties, and it's hoped that that'll have at
least some modest benefits.)

We'll try to do this in the trunk and in the 1.9 "release candidate" (coming soon!
Honest!) and, if all goes well, use the new scheme for 1.9.  For most people, the
change should be transparent and things should work as they have (knock wood); people
who have svn commit access should find it a little easier to exercise that.

The change depends on a feature introduced in svn 1.5, which was released ~5 years
ago.  Unless you're running a fairly old OS release, it's very likely that the
version that you've been using is new enough.  (You can check that by doing

$ svn --version

in a shell, assuming that you're using a command-line svn client.  As long as that
indicates that you're running 1.5 or later - and as long as there aren't any
unexpected issues - you should be able to forget about this.)

On OSX, the svn client distributed with OSX 10.6 or later (or with the XCode 
command line tools associated with those OS releases) should be new enough.
The svn client distributed with OSX 10.5 (Leopard) is too old; if you use
an OSX package management system (MacPorts, Fink, Homebrew ...) you'll likely
find that that system provides a newer version of svn; you can also find
standalone binaries for OSX 10.5 at:

<http://svnbinaries.open.collab.net/servlets/ProjectDocumentList?folderID=343&expandFolder=343&folderID=164>

and likely other sites; that site also contains subversion binaries for Windows, Solaris, and
other platforms.

I think that the change is desirable but it's not mandatory; I'm also assuming that the dependency
on svn 1.5+ won't affect too many people (or won't affect them too much.)