Subversion and building problems

Last week I spent a while on subversion, I was able to figure out how to grab files from the repository but I couldn't load things onto it. I got some help from classmates and after a couple hours of looking through a tutorial was able to upload to the server. Once I got that to work, I tried to build empathy but I keep running into this problem of packages that aren't available yet or I can't get the most recent version but they are required to build it. I feel like once we are working on it together as a group we will be able to break through this problem or agree on scrapping the project. One good thing is that I was able to sign up for their bug monitoring system(bugzilla). I haven't chosen which bug we are gonna work on as a group, but I have been able to narrow it down to some very simple bugs. It is a good start for us because none of us really know the language C.