Hello Bruno,

> btw, why is svn still needed? I see that it is only used for
> ExternalLibraries which are anyway in a git repository (is it because of
> the particular directory structure of that repository?).
Not so much because of the directory structure but because of the
content. We use svn for the ExternalLibraries thorns, which contain a
tarball of the library (in case no copy is found on the system).

Since git downloads the full version history (by default, and shallow,
--depth 1 checkouts do not work for us when using branches) we did not
want to use git for those (since eg the MPI ExternalLibrary repo is
~172MB of "old" commits and ~10MB of checked out files. svn can
download a single revision more easily.

Yours,
Roland

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