Yes, trunk looks healthier. (Hacked-up modpack using svn.gna.org at http://tartarus.org/~jacob/junk/20110718/amplio.modpack)

(Goes a lot quicker than S2_3, too!)

When I point freeciv-modpack at the following modpack:

http://www.cazfi.net/freeciv/modinst/2.3/amplio.modpack

which, at time of writing, points to svn.gna.org (see task 7246), the downloaded content is corrupted compared to the same content fetched manually with wget.

The corruption looks a lot like HTTP "chunked" transfer encoding. For instance, amplio/water.spec:

(where "^M" is a CR character).

Fetching from svn.gna.org is particularly likely to trigger this, since the content is served dynamically, which makes using chunked transfer make more sense. Moving the Amplio content to download.gna.org might mask the problem in this case. However, presumably, in principle any server could decide to use this at any time.

I've seen the same behaviour on Windows (cproc's S2_3 build from patch #2812) and Ubuntu Linux (an older S2_3 build, don't have exact version to hand).