While googling for the right program to mirror an SVN repository, I came across this post: http://blog.codefront.net/2007/03/29/setting-up-svnsync-ed-mirrored-svn-....
The post is about tutorial on using svnsync, which is a very handy program available since SVN 1.4 to mirror an SVN repository. The first part is not so interesting but for one thing: checkinstall (http://asic-linux.com.mx/~izto/checkinstall/).

As it is described there, I also found myself a bit uncomfortable with compiling and installing a package from source code for one reason: to cleanly uninstall the installed files. Another example is http://forums.opensuse.org/programming-scripting/399420-uninstalling-pro....

Several tricks come to mind though such as the ones described here: http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/uninstall-files-installed-from-a-source-co... (i.e., taking a snapshot of the whole file system before and after installation to get the difference, which is none other than the files to uninstall [this is unwise though]) or instrument `make install' with strace or so. However, I hadn't tried any of the approach when I found checkinstall out.

As described in the blog post, it is really handy and released under GPL version 2. I cannot ask for more!