I have created a system alias for svn1.6 so you do not have to create your own alias inside your .bashrc file (a suggestion I made in last week's alog).

Without doing anything, you should have two versions of svn client available:

svn (runs the workstation's latest version, currently 1.8.10)

svn1.6 (runs version 1.6-17 out of the /ligo/apps/debian8 area)

alog  40392 explains how to determine which svn version each working directory is aligned to, and therefore which client to use.