Lately I’ve been working on an app and experimenting with many different Document oriented databases, couchdb being one of them. I recently needed to upgrade to version 0.90 of couchdb but unfortunately there is no debian packages available to install it. So install by hand I had to go. Hopefully this helps you, but keep in mind this information will be deprecated probably by next week.
First, you need to install some pre-requesite libraries:
sudo apt-get install libmozjs-dev sudo apt-get install libicu-dev sudo apt-get install libcurl-openssl-dev sudo apt-get install erlang
Now go get couchdb 0.90 and compile it
wget http://mirrors.24-7-solutions.net/pub/apache/couchdb/0.9.0/apache-couchdb-0.9.0.tar.gz tar zxvf apache-couchdb-0.9.0.tar.gz cd apache-couchdb-0.9.0 ./configure && make && sudo make install
That’s it… now just run couchdb and you should be good to go… hopefully the next version is available soon! 
Thank you for the recipe. I believe line three of the prerequisite libraries should read: sudo apt-get install libcurl4-openssl-dev
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