> we used to mandate the presence of a svn install

And we regretted that so much that we changed away from it :)

When discussing this changeover plan, Zach and I decided we needed a fallback requiring only OS dependencies. In this case, the Powershell dependency fails on Windows 7 since it does not have the Invoke-WebRequest command (unless you've been installing all your updates).

We decided against using git first because then the case that is more reliable (download and extract a .zip file from a URL) would go unused/untested in many cases.

We also use the potentially installed python.exe in other places in the build, so it's far from a waste to grab it, and we already required *any* Python dependency to do a full build (docs and/or installer), so it isn't really adding anything there. The bit that was overlooked was the PowerShell on old systems limitation, and the absence of py.exe when you don't have Python 3 installed.