I’ve recently experiencing a very annoying problem when trying to update modules located in SVN servers using JHBuild. The error was something like this svn: Network socket initialization failed. This was even reported as debian bug. But it’s not definitely a bug in SVN, the problem is located in the libgcrypt library used by SVN to deal with SSL enabled SVN servers. Being inside a JHBuild shell you’ll most likely have a LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable that will point to the location you setup as destination folder for the modules to build. So the svn command will use that libgcrypt and thus the error will appear.

It’s as easy as to wrap your svn command like this for example.

#!/bin/sh
unset LD_LIBRARY_PATH
exec /usr/bin/svn "$@"

Update: BTW jdub I’ve now a hackergotchi (thx pvanhoof). You can take it from here. It could be already seen in Planet Igalia