The code you are about to download is a Release Candidate for Apache Subversion.
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.
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.
If you are interested in helping us test this Release Candidate, you're very welcome to download and test these packages, and report bugs back to the developers; but please keep in mind that this is not a final release of Apache Subversion, so only use it on data you aren't afraid to lose.
As stated above, this is not an official, end-user release of Subversion. It is a distribution intended for testing only, and is not suitable for production use. It has not been publicly announced.
Packages with alpha, beta, or rc in their names will remain unsuitable for production use even they have been publicly announced; if you chose to package such a pre-release for your operating system distro's management system, you must do so in a way which clearly denotes that it is not a final release, and is only for testing purposes.
And please don't package anything you see here before it has been publicly announced.
(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.