Thanks for the reply.
As a side note I just found out that Wine is using SVK as well and they have a nice how to
http://wiki.winehq.com/SVK
Back to your reply.
You are correct SVK relies heavily on the underlying infrstructure of subversion but guess what svk does not rely on svn files
http://svk.elixus.org/?SVKAbout
Read the 2nd bullet.