netpbm fails to download using svn

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Oct 16, 2011, at 23:23, Brandon Allbery wrote:
> On Sun, Oct 16, 2011 at 23:18, Ryan Schmidt wrote:
>> On Oct 16, 2011, at 18:08, Frank J. R. Hanstick wrote:
>>> > How does this error get corrected if the maintainer is unwilling to fix an obvious defect?
>> 
>> Are you saying that MacPorts' capability to fetch sources from CVS, Subversion, Git, Mercurial, and Bazaar repositories should never be used, because sometimes individual projects' servers might be down?
> 
> You're reading backwards.  *Someone* thinks so, which is what the OP is complaining about; see http://trac.macports.org/ticket/29692 .

Ah yes, I misunderstood how much text in the email was being quoted from the ticket.

> (In short:  they aren't fixing svn checkout,

What is there to fix? Isn't the problem that the particular Subversion server in question happened to be offline, presumably temporarily? Isn't the solution then to report the outage to the administrators of the server?

> because they think svn is evil.  I'm somewhat boggled by the comment in question;

Yes...

> if they don't like svn, why is the port using it?)

This branch of the software is only distributed from the Subversion repository; there are no downloadable tarballs available. The alternative would be for the maintainer to package up a tarball and arrange to have it uploaded to distfiles.macports.org; that's rather less convenient for the maintainer.