To setup Subversion over Apache, check: http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/Subversion

This page explains how to set svn props: http://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.1/ch07s02.html

• To set the $Id$ property, we do
  $ svn propset svn:keywords "Id" filename
• To set executable on a file, we do
  $ svn propset svn:executable on filename

Once in a while, I ran into this error with subversion:

svn: This client is too old to work with working copy ...

There are a couple of senarios:

1. The subversion is indeed too old, then we just upgrade it.

2. We temporarily tried a newer version of subversion. And the trial upgraded the format of the svn metadata.

3. We copied (rsync) the entire directory from another server that has a higher subversion.

The book "Rails Cookbook" has a wonderful section on "Getting Your Rails Project into Subversion".

In short, here are the steps:

Subversion supports symbolic link, as stated in http://subversion.tigris.org/. Here is the quote:  

it's simple to test this. In a directory where you have svn code checked out, do

% ln -s file file_link
% svn add file_link
% svn ci

Reference: Subversion - Gentoo