Sure. The usual configuration is that SVN is provided by an Apache module (mod_dav and mod_dav_svn) usually over HTTPS so that passwords are not sniffable and mod_authz_svn provides access control. The documentation for this is http://svnbook.red-bean.com/nightly/en/svn.serverconfig.httpd.html .
We could probably even make it authenticate against the users table from drupal.org. I remember that there were issues in the past with CVS passwords not matching... (I might be wrong about that though).
Yeah, this is a minor pain in the ass (my ass, to be precise, since I don't think anyone else has ever fielded one of the cvs_rename issues). But, I've been documenting the process in various issues and hopefully others could pick up some of this (relatively small, in the scheme of things) support load.
There are few requests because most people don't know that it's possible to rename files in CVS via a hack. And even if they do know, they are reluctant because it takes time and is not something they can do immediately themselves.
cvs tag -b DRUPAL-7--1
we can say
svn copy /contributions/HEAD/modules/foo /contributions/DRUPAL-7--1/ modules/foo/
It's SO much easier to explain this because this is what you have on your hard drive. The cvs tag/branch essentially means virtual directories meaning an abstraction layer which people need to comprehend. Here you have files directories and nothing virtual. (Let's not fight now the actual paths we can discuss how to lay out our repo).
The concept of tags as CVS implements it is indeed not easy to grasp, especially if you use a GUI client. I remember that I had a hard time tagging and branching things (documentation was not as good as it is nowadays back then, admittedly). It's much easier if you see that you have different directories with the same directory layout underneath them. I agree that SVN's notion of tags is somewhat different from CVS' approach (which is not necessarily bad, it's just more difficult to understand, imho), but it's certainly not bad. Merging things between branches or copying files from one branch to another or just plain diffing of two branches/tags are more straightforward in SVN because you *see* the directory layout on your hard disk instead of imagining all the different "shadow versions" of the file in your head. Konstantin