netpbm fails to download using svn

[Joshua Root]

On 28164-7-23 05:59 , Brandon Allbery wrote:
> On Sun, Oct 16, 2011 at 23:18, Ryan Schmidt <ryandesign at macports.org> 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 .  (In short:
>  they aren't fixing svn checkout, because they think svn is evil.  I'm
> somewhat boggled by the comment in question; if they don't like svn, why is
> the port using it?)

That's not an entirely accurate summary of the maintainer's position.
It's more like "svn over HTTP is evil, and svn over HTTPS is
significantly less evil."

The port is using it simply because upstream doesn't make tarballs
available except for the "super stable" (which apparently translates as
"really old and incompatible with the current versions of the libs it
uses") branch.

- Josh