We've attempted to ensure that compiling apr, apr-iconv and
apr-util distribution tarballs requires nothing more than what
comes installed by default on various UNIX platforms.
All you should have to do is this:
./configure
make
make install
As of this writing, APR is not quite ready to be installed as a
system-wide shared library; it currently works best when tied
directly to the application using it.
Note that if you are compiling directly from the Subversion repository,
you'll need GNU autoconf and GNU libtool installed, and you'll need
to run ./buildconf
before running the commands listed above.