Rather than patching in support for the new working copy format, why not just
look for the 'svn' binary and call 'svn info --xml'?

This is exactly the kind of use case that command was designed for; it's save
untold man-hours of misery across the globe, at the small cost of a slightly
slower build.

I'm completely against the patches that simply update the existing (broken)
functionality.

Thoughts?