For compatibility reasons, the current version of Subversion in MirPorts is still 1.5. I tried to remedy the situation a few days ago and committed subversion-1.6.6-0 into a branch a few days ago. It is not yet in the trunk because it has some nasty bugs. For example this gem:

% perl -MSVN::Core -e 1
Bus error

This, of course, makes svk unusable, as it is written in Perl using the SVN perl bindings. svk is my way of making Subversion bearable, with easy replication, offline commits, and more.

I think I found the reason now: The SVN people managed to screw up the Perl module build so that the modules link against stuff in /usr/lib instead of $PREFIX. Incidentally, Darwin includes svn-1.4.4 in the base system. Sigh.

Wow, it seems that I have not written anything here in the last four months. Between my thesis and Real Life(TM), there is just not enough time for everything.

One more thing though: I have been attending a course on "Scientific Writing" at the Université de Haute Alsace, with excellent hints on article styles, writing readable scientific prose, and more. I can recommend such a course to every scientist, but also to all those who regularly publish things—including articles in CS journals, Free software project posters or announcements. There are also some excellent articles on how not to write. I especially recommend Martin W. Gregory, The infectiousness of pompous prose, Nature 360 11–12 (1992). Unfortunately, you will need a subscription to read it.