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
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.