It seems that now would be a good time to start testing since development activity is pretty low. (perhaps everyone is busy with other things...). I have not used svn really at all, so I am probably not the one to spearhead this effort. But I can test while learning SVN.
I wouldn't feel comfortable setting up the initial repos, but I can do if no-one else (more experienced) is up for it.
imo, subversion is both easier to use and more powerful than cvs ... but converting the current cvs repository to svn is not really trivial ... because of different branch handling ...
some people have branches in their external folders, which would probably be converted to subfolders ... making the directory structure a bit messy ... imo, it would be better to set up multiple repositories for the externals, abstractions, and the pd core ... maybe ever multiple repositories for the externals ...
but maybe someone has a better idea?
tim