How do you know the neon library maintainers didn't do just what you suggest, but being human, still managed to make mistakes? Are you arguing against the use of libraries that you yourself don't write? You know OpenOffice uses neon, right? Are you saying that the OpenOffice developers are idiots because they also use neon?

As long as people write software, no matter how good they are, no matter what OS they write for, there will always be security flaws. To assume otherwise is folly.

But the original argument was: CLA-2004:883 is a reason not to use Subversion. I just pointed out that it is in fact a very good reason not to use an older version of Subversion... it's not a specific argument against Subversion itself.

You statement, on the other hand, is a basic ad hominem fallacy ( http://www.datanation.com/fallacies/attack.htm ) , and doesn't really refute anything.