I'm using a Sabayon as my primary OS now. It's a rolling distro. And it fairly quickly incorporates latest changes from mainline projects.
Few weeks ago among other updates subversion was upgraded from 1.6 to 1.7. At first there were no problems, because I mainly used command line svn client. I upgraded my working copies to 1.7 and was happy.
The problem started to arise when I tried to work with upgraded working copy from my IDE - Idea. The first problem was that Idea does not support subversion 1.7. And will not support it for a few more month.
So, I tried to downgrade subversion package on my OS. This failed, because 1.6 was removed from repository.
There was a chance to build 1.6 from sources. But I prefer not to mix binary and compiled from sources packages.
I ended up with solution suggested on stackoverflow. I used another OS (Ubuntu) on my multi-boot machine which still has subversion 1.6. From there I deleted a subversion folders from my projects. Which is easy in subversion 1.7 ;) Then I made a checkout to existing projects. This allowed me to not loose any changes.
Then I rebooted to my primary OS and used subversion from IDE only.