Subversion in sid / QA page

[Farmbuyer <farmbuyer@gmail.com>]

I've recently found myself with a need to upgrade my SVN client to 1.7,
so I started poking around some.

- The versions in testing/sid are 1.6.*, so I started looking at getting the
  src package and rolling my own .deb for now.
- Every release since 2006 has "dfsg" on it.  It's been too long since I used
  Debian and I don't remember what is indicated by "dfsg" in a package name,
  but I vaguely recall it being unusual.
- The QA page has a note:  "A new upstream version is available: 1.6.17, you
  should consider packaging it."  Except that the "1.6.17" link is semi-
  outdated; trying to go to the given parent page of
  subversion.tigris.org/downloads doesn't give a 403 redirect, but rather a
  blurb pointing to subversion.apache.org/download -- and on that page, 1.7.1
  is listed as the most recent version, like you'd expect.

None of that especially worries me, but it does make me wonder:  has anyone
tried building 1.7.* on a sid system?  Is there anything in the build rules from
1.6.* that caused you trouble?  I'd love to avoid solving the same issues from
scratch if I can.

And a meta-question:  where might I look for discussions about future SVN
package plans?  Searching debian-user archives didn't find anything.  I'm
hoping the maintainer is just on holiday for a bit.