Assembla servers are now running the newly released Subversion 1.7, which is faster, looks better on your disk, and contains many other improvements.

You will still be able to use your Subversion 1.6 clients.  However, we recommend that you upgrade to a Subversion 1.7 clients, because many operations will be faster. Download free Subversion 1.7 clients here.

Why upgrade your client?

Server operations are faster in version 1.7.  HTTPv2 and libserf reduce the "chattiness" of subversion and allow for faster pulls and pushes to the repository over http and https.  The server is now tunable to allow for various caching mechanisms and data compression.

On your local working copy, the Subversion information is centralized and those annoying .svn files go away because only one ".svn" directory is created.  This centralized metadata also makes svn operations faster.  When you start the Subversion 1.7 client, it will ask you if it can convert your working copy to the new 1.7 format.

Hint:  Subversion 1.7 will upgrade your working copy, so if you use multiple clients, you should wait until you can upgrade all of them.  For example, if you use subclipse inside the Eclipse IDE, and TortoiseSVN outside of Eclipse, it's a good idea to get the most recent subclipse  (which supports the 1.7 format) when you upgrade TortoiseSVN.

Hint: Subversion 1.7 clients cannot upgrade inconsistent 1.6 working copies.  Before upgrading to a 1.7 client, a 1.6 client must be used to run svn cleanup on all working copies that require cleanup.

The full Subversion 1.7 release notes are available on the Apache Subversion site. 

Subversion 1.7 clients are listed on the Assembla Subversion reference site.