The best available version of Subversion is: 1.3.1
You can install Subversion by compiling its source code release directly, or you can install one of the prepackaged binaries if there is one for your operating system. Unless a release has "alpha", "beta", or "rc" in its name, it is tested and considered stable for production use. Once you have Subversion installed, most of your questions can be answered by reading the Subversion Book and FAQ.
To upgrade to the latest release, just install "on top of" an older release. Any Subversion 1.X program is forward-compatible with newer 1.Y libraries. No repository upgrade is required. As long as a client and server both have the same major release number (1), an older client works with a newer server and a newer client works with an older server. The only caveat is that if the client and server minor release numbers don't match (e.g 1.0 and 1.1), then not all new features may not be available.
The 1.0 and 1.1 development line are no longer active. We are no longer fixing bugs in 1.0.x/1.1.x nor making 1.0.x/1.1.x releases. Only the discovery of a horrible data-loss or security bug would prompt us to do another 1.0.x/1.1.x release. If you discover a bug in 1.0/1.1, it is likely already fixed in a later development line. If you report the bug, you'll probably be told to upgrade first.
The latest source release can always be found
in this directory, in the file-sharing area of the Subversion
website.
Windows users should download .zip files.
For all other operating systems, download .tar.gz or
.tar.bz2 files.
Be sure to read the general instructions for building from the source tarball, and the specific instructions within the source code itself.
The Subversion project does not officially endorse or maintain any binary packages of the Subversion software. However, volunteers have created binary packages for different distributions and platforms, and as a convenience, we maintain a list of links to them here. If there are any problems with or questions about the different binary packages please send email to the Subversion users mailing list.
NOTE: Binary packages usually come out about a week after the corresponding source release. Please don't post to the mailing lists asking when a binary package for a given platform will be ready. The packagers already know when new source releases come out, and work as fast as they can to make binaries available.
RedHat 7.x, 8.0, 9, RedHat Enterprise Linux 3, 4
Maintainer: David Summers
UK Mirror (fastest) or http://summersoft.fay.ar.us/pub/subversion/latest/ (slowest)
WARNING: the RedHat Enterprise Linux 3 subversion 1.2 and later RPMs above (from David Summers) are not compiled with Berkeley DB support (All other versions are compiled with Berkeley BDB support). If you need to access Berkeley DB repositories, these RPMS will not work for you. (See this thread for details.) You may want to try different RPMS instead.
Fedora Core 1, 2, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3, 4
Maintainer: Dag Wieers
Fedora Core 3
Binary RPM packages of Subversion 1.1.x are already available in this distribution. If you do not already have them installed then you may install them from the installation CD/DVD or use "yum install subversion" to install them from the internet distribution mirrors. Alternatively, the Dag repository linked to above also has packages for this distribution, and is more likely to update to Subversion 1.2.x when it is officially released.
Just run 'apt-get install subversion'. Information on the latest official packages can be found here: http://packages.debian.org/subversion.
Maintainer: Olaf Hering
SuSE Linux 9.2 and earlier do not ship with any (up to date) version of Subversion. However, unofficial packages exist in the projects/apache/subversion directory of SuSE mirrors.
Maintainer: Lev Serebryakov
Information about the latest port can be found here:http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/ports/devel/subversion/.
Assuming your ports tree is up-to-date, just 'cd /usr/ports/devel/subversion; make install'.
Maintainer: Aleksander Piotrowski
Information about the latest port can be found here: http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi/ports/devel/subversion/
Assuming your ports tree is up-to-date, just do:
cd /usr/ports/devel/; subversion; make install
Maintainer: Eric Gillespie
pkgsrc is the cross-platform package system used by the NetBSD project, originally derived from FreeBSD ports.
Information about the latest package can be found here:http://cvsweb.netbsd.org/bsdweb.cgi/pkgsrc/devel/subversion/.
Assuming your pkgsrc tree is up-to-date, just 'cd /usr/pkgsrc/devel/subversion; make install clean'.
Maintainer: Steven M. Christensen
Binary builds of Subversion for Solaris 2.5-9 on SPARC and Solaris 8-9 on x86/Intel are available at: http://www.sunfreeware.com/.
Maintainer: Christian Schaffner
Information about the latest Fink packages can be found
here:
http://fink.sourceforge.net/pdb/search.php?summary=svn.
Be sure to read the documentation of the different packages.
Maintainer: Matthew E. Porter
Pre-built binaries that do not require Fink can be found here: http://metissian.com/projects/macosx/subversion/.
The client runs on Win9x/Me but the server does not, see the FAQ.
Maintainer: Branko Čibej
The latest command-line binaries and libraries for Windows can be found in this directory of the file-sharing area. The packages are ".zip" files.
Please do not ask about Python 2.4 bindings for Windows. This message explains why.
WARNING: subversion 1.2 (and later) win32 binaries use BerkeleyDB 4.3. If you already have BDB 4.2 repositories running on Windows, then installing these particular binaries will force you to upgrade your repositories to BDB 4.3. It's not difficult, just be ready to do so. Read the FAQ.
Maintainer: Jostein Andersen
The same command-line binaries and libraries, but packaged within a friendly Installer program, are in the same directory of the file-sharing area, but end with "-setup.exe".
Maintainer: Steve King
If you want a pretty Win32 GUI, TortoiseSVN integrates nicely with the Windows Explorer. Note: TortoiseSVN is a separate project. Please post questions and problems to the TortoiseSVN project's own mailing lists., not Subversion's mailing lists.
Maintainer: Mark Phippard
Binary builds of Subversion for OS/400 V5R1 or higher, as well as documentation for installing and configuring Subversion are available at: http://www.softlanding.com/subversion/index.htm.