Hi,
According to the sourceforge site at http://sourceforge.net/p/pure-data/svn/HEAD/tree/ it's svn checkout svn://svn.code.sf.net/p/pure-data/svn/trunk pure-data-svn so maybe the server is busy or something.
Indeed, thank you! It works now and I can compile the externals, great! The only question missing, is if there is any difference between the Pd sources within that package and the sources I cat get from Miller's git repo?
best, P