I just compiled exiv2 0.27.0.1 on ubuntu 18.04.1 following these instructions:
http://dev.exiv2.org/projects/exiv2/wiki/Building_on_Ubuntu_using_Cmake
It took me only a couple of minutes.
#2. You will likely get the error E: You must put some 'source' URIs in your sources.list", don’t forget to fix it before moving on to the #3. The solution posted here: http://askubuntu.com/a/496554/95343
#3. Change svn checkout svn://dev.exiv2.org/svn/trunk to git clone https://github.com/Exiv2/exiv2.git if you want the latest version. SVN repo got frozen at 0.26 and is depreciated now.
If you pulled the code from git your path instead of cd trunk will be cd exiv2