git svn without root

git svn is my favorite way of working with svn. Uses less space than a native svn sandbox, still contains the complete bloody history, and doesn't fool grep-find with the pristine copies.

Installing both the right way isn't quite easy. For git you just need the standard install, but you need to install svn including its perl bindings. And you can control the installation location of svn with the usual --prefix=$HOME/local to configure, but this does not change the place where make install-swig-pl wants to place the shared libraries and other perl binding code. You can only change that by doing some steps manually:

tar xzf subversion-deps-1.5.4.tar.gz 
cd subversion-1.5.4
CFLAGS=-fPIC ./configure --prefix=$HOME/local
make
make install
make swig-pl-lib
make install-swig-pl-lib
cd subversion/bindings/swig/perl/native
perl Makefile.PL PREFIX=$HOME/local
make install

Basic point: You need to invoke the perl make separately, and tell it where to install. Seems not to be so easy to include an option for that into the toplevel configure?

Also note the need to manually say CFLAGS=-fPIC even though the target system (Novell SuSE) isn't exactly unusual, and configure should figure this out.

Anyway, the perl library path (PERL5LIB) seems to already include $HOME/local, so after above commands, git svn works. If you use a different location you need to fix PERL5LIB.