I've been publishing backports of Subversion over at github.com for RHEL based operating systems for some years now. They used to be published at RPMForge while that was still active. And it was useful to me, and to some others, to get up-to-date releases on current or older operating systems, especially for the long-term RHEL based systems.
Unfortunately, it's gotten too expensive for me to do. There are several factors. The big one is the updated requirements with each major release. Using more recent new technologies, like serf, and SQLite are understandable upstream changes, but it means integrating support for them for another set of RPM's for those components, and building up the support chains for tools like updated serf, multiplies the work and threatens other stable tools which might use serf. It's an old issue for many projects, but the return on investment of my time has pretty much evaporated with RPMforge defunct. I'm also afraid that the other big factor, for me, is the long-missing "obliterate" feature. The lack of any graceful way to clear inappropriately committed or discarded content has become the biggest reason *not* to use Subversion, and I can't burn my engineering time backporting software without a graceful way to clean up the inevitably bulky or security sensitive bad commit.
