The best available version of Subversion is: 1.4.4
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The 1.0 and 1.1 development line are no longer active.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.
Red Hat 8.0, 9, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3, 4, 5
Maintainer: David Summers
UK Mirror (fastest) or http://summersoft.fay.ar.us/pub/subversion/latest/ (slowest).
WARNING: The Red Hat 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 RHEL3 RPMs will not work for you. (See this thread for details.) You may want to try different RPMs instead.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4
Maintainer: CollabNet, Inc.
CollabNet Subversion is Subversion compiled and tested by CollabNet, and deployed with CollabNet's recommended configuration for the enterprise.
Fedora Core 3 and later
Binary RPM packages of Subversion are already available in these distributions. 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.
Just run 'apt-get install subversion'. Information on the latest official packages can be found here: http://packages.debian.org/subversion .
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 do '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 do 'cd /usr/pkgsrc/devel/subversion; make install clean'.
Maintainer: Steven M. Christensen
Binary builds of Subversion for SPARC/Solaris 2.5 – 10 and x86/Solaris 8 – 10 are available at: http://www.sunfreeware.com/ .
Maintainer: CollabNet, Inc.
CollabNet Subversion is Subversion compiled and tested by CollabNet, and deployed with CollabNet's recommended configuration for the enterprise.
Universal Subversion Installer
Maintainer: Jeremy Whitlock
Universal Subversion binary containing standard repository access layers, file system backends, Apache Subversion modules, and all Subversion language bindings maintained by the Subversion project. The latest release can be found here: http://downloads.open.collab.net/binaries.html.
Installation using Fink
Maintainer: Christian Schaffner
Information about the latest Fink packages can be found here: http://pdb.finkproject.org/pdb/package.php/svn .
Be sure to read the documentation of the different packages.
Installation from a .dmg
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.
If you plan to install the mod_dav_svn Apache module, note that Apache 2.0 and Apache 2.2 are not binary-compatible. Thus there are two types of Subverison command-line binary/library packages for Windows -- ones built to use with Apache 2.0, and ones built to use Apache 2.2. If you're using Apache as your Subversion server, be sure to download the correct package.
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.
Maintainers: Branko Čibej and D.J. Heap
Maintainer: Troy Simpson
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: CollabNet, Inc.
CollabNet Subversion is Subversion compiled and tested by CollabNet, and deployed with CollabNet's recommended configuration for the enterprise. Compatible with Apache 2.0.
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/ .