@jaraco This approach cost me an hour of billable time last week, and your
suggestion is likely to do the same in future. The .svn layout is internal to
Subversion: it should simply be assumed that without the official client, its
contents cannot be accessed (an approach taken by most sane software).

It is then suggested that depending on the Subversion client would be
"non-trivial in general and creates a hard dependency on a specific
implementation of svn." -- what exactly is this (broken) patch doing, if not
requiring a specific implementation of Subversion? Except instead of depending
on an interface whose interface is contracted never to change, depending on an
internal interface, external software shouldn't even be aware of.

I do not understand the lack of desire to depend on an external binary. Surely
any environment where a package is being built for some program just exported
from source control, the relevant binaries are almost certainly present on the
system (what other sane means could a directory with ".svn" subdirs have ended
up on the machine)

David