To my experience, compiling the latest Subversion from Collab site is quite some work. As an alternative to this, Wandisco site offers for free the (almost)-newest version of subversion package for Debian. It’s already compiled, tested and ready for production.
Since Debian Wheezy doesn’t quite have the proper versions of packages necessary to install these SVN packages, here is a solution below: Use Debian backports.
Sources: http://www.wandisco.com
Note: I would recommend to comment out these repositories when doing a normal upgrade of other packages to avoid upgrading them from the Backports and getting packages versions incompatibilities.
Commands to run:
echo "# backports" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/WandiscoSVN.list
echo "deb http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/ wheezy-backports main" >> /etc/apt/sources.list.d/WandiscoSVN.list
echo "deb http://opensource.wandisco.com/debian wheezy svn17" >> /etc/apt/sources.list.d/WandiscoSVN.list
cd /etc/apt
wget http://opensource.wandisco.com/wandisco-debian.gpg
apt-key add wandisco-debian.gpg
apt-get update
apt-get install subversion