None of the developer labs are limited by disk space, so it’s not really a consideration for us. If disk space and bandwidth became restrictively expensive, we’d optimize for it. As it is, developer time is vastly more expensive than anything else, so whatever makes development easier is what gets done. (Also, none of us use the release for anything, we use the development version.)
A) We haven’t included the subversion files in the past. Assuming we included them on purpose this time, it’s probably so users can revert changes locally instead of redownloading the code. It sure is convenient to SVN revert mistakes… (Um, it’s also possible it was just an oversight, I don’t know, I don’t do the release.)
Probably 50% or more of the stuff in the rosetta_source directory is junk beyond the svn files you removed. There’s a huge amount of testing data integrated into the codebase. Some of us have been trying to get it moved out but there’s institutional inertia. Where are you such that you are administrating Rosetta across multiple platforms? Let me know if you want help removing some of that extra data to slim your Rosetta installs down and I’ll be happy to point it out (big hint: everything in the test directory can probably go if you are managing it for the end users…)
C) I don’t know enough about SCons to address it but I’ll point out your concern to someone who does.