When I got my new MacBook Pro, I installed Xcode which comes with subversion (version 1.6.x):
$ which svn
/usr/bin/svn
$ /usr/bin/svn --version | head -1
svn, version 1.6.2 (r37639)After installing Xcode I checked out some repositories to my local filesystem. Soon afterward, I realized I needed to be running an older subversion client to stay compatible with some 1.5.x repositories, so I decided to install CollabNet's OSX subversion binary (registration is required for older releases).
After downloading and installing the package (which defaults to /opt/subversion/bin/svn), I edited the /etc/profile file to override priority of my $PATH variable (since I now had 2 versions of subversion installed):
# lines added to /etc/profile:
export PATH=/opt/subversion/bin:$PATHNow, if I ran a "which" command for svn, the appropriate svn executable is returned:
$ which svn
/opt/subversion/bin/svnUnfortunately, the subversion projects I checked out using Xcode's subversion were inaccessible due to differences in the .svn structure:
$ cd /path/to/my/1.6.x/repo
$ svn stat
svn: This client is too old to work with working copy '.'. You need
to get a newer Subversion client, or to downgrade this working copy.
See http://subversion.tigris.org/faq.html#working-copy-format-change
for details.Luckily, CollabNet has a downloadable python script which allows you to switch checked out repositories to different versions. I downloaded this file and copied it into /opt/subversion/bin.
I was now able to update/downgrade my repositories using this python script:
$ svn --version | head -1
svn, version 1.5.7 (r36142)
$ cd /path/to/my/1.6.x/repo
$ change-svn-wc-format.py . 1.5
Converted WC at '.' into format 9 for Subversion 1.5




















