makepkg

makepkg is a tool used in Arch Linux to create packages. A package is first defined in a PKGBUILD file. PKGBUILD files are really simple. You first define things like package names, versions etc, and then define the functions to build the package. These usually are as simple as

build() {
	make
}

package() {
	make install
}

Once you have a PKGBUILD, simply run makepkg in the same directory as the PKGBUILD and it will go and download all the files and build the package.

With SVN

makepkg has support for building packages directly from version control systems, including SVN. In order to make use of this simply name your package xxxyyy-svn and provide a pkgver() function,

pkgver() {
	cd local_repo
	svnversion
}

This will cause makepkg to update its checked out copy, run the pkgver() function to see if it needs to rebuild the program, then rebuild it if required with the version set to the string output by pkgver().

If you wish, you could make pkgver() read a version file in the repository, or even read the svn log to determine what the version should be. However, simply using the revision number seems kind of clean.