I decided to upgrade svn to 1.5. I used MacPorts because it seemed like the easiest thing to do. It worked fine, but when I type 'svn --version' in a terminal, it still says it's at 1.4.4. After poking around, I found that MacPorts had put svn in /opt/local/bin, while the system is looking at /usr/bin. Is there an easy way to make the newer version take precedence without manually deleting the old version? I'm afraid to meddle with things I don't understand.

Hm. I'm surprised MacPorts didn't add something like:
to your .profile file or something. Anyway, I think that's all you would need to add to have the MacPorts version of SVN be the default.

Strangely, those lines are already in my .profile.

Edit: As a temporary workaround, I told svnX to look in /opt/local/bin for the svn binaries, but I would still like to fix my system path issues. Also, svnX hasn't been updated in ages, and the only alternatives are the command line, or $60+ apps, as far as I can tell.

To avoid confusion, delete one of the SVN binaries. Both are in your $PATH, or maybe not, depending on which shell you start. So replace one of the binaries with a symlink to the other location.

I ended up taking DoG's suggestion and backing up the old binaries.

RapidSVN is much better than svnX. updated too. I use that. http://rapidsvn.tigris.org/