The code you are about to download is a Release Candidate for Subversion @VERSION@.
A Release Candidate is exactly what it sounds like: a distribution of Subversion that may become an official release later, if and only if it passes preliminary testing by those members of the community who are interested in testing it.
As such, if you are interested in helping us test this Release Candidate, you're very welcome to download and test these packages. If you are looking for a copy of Subversion for production use, this is not it; you should instead grab the latest stable release from the Download area.
As stated above, this is not an official, end-user release of Subversion. It is a distribution intended for testing only. Please do not package this distribution in any way. It should not be made available to users who rely on their operating system distro's packages.
(Taken from a mail by Karl Fogel on the subject)
Subversion release candidates are for testing only. We might have to withdraw one to fix bugs, and fixing those bugs might involve changing APIs, or changing a soft-upgrade strategy in the repository or working copy formats. If some production users had begun depending on the new API, or had unknowingly soft-upgraded their repository or working copy, then they'd be in for a very unpleasant suprise when the real release comes out and doesn't have the same API anymore, or doesn't use the same formats. Not only would Subversion suddenly "stop working" for them, but there wouldn't be any convenient path to get it working again, since no blessed Subversion release would have the code needed to interpret their legacy data.
We encourage RC testing by users who know how to install from a tarball independently of their OS's packaging system. Users who install only packaged releases, however, should wait for and use only officially released Subversions. Anything else is playing with fire. When the inevitable blowup happens, both your reputation as a packager and Subversion's reputation will suffer -- but only one will deserve it.
If you want to help us test this distribution of Subversion, you can find the files here.