There've been complaints on and off that initial cloning of the git repositories (via anongit) takes ages, and sometimes even fails repeatedly (the bigger the repo, e.g. translations, the more likely this is to happen) Thus, there are weekly-updated tarballs of the repos, available here: http://dev-www.libreoffice.org/bundle - they are on a server in Europe, and more importantly, downloads can be resumed. It would be nice to add a configure switch, that, instead of cloning, would grab this tarball and unpack it to the right place.
[This is an automated message.] This bug was filed before the changes to Bugzilla on 2011-10-16. Thus it started right out as NEW without ever being explicitly confirmed. The bug is changed to state NEEDINFO for this reason. To move this bug from NEEDINFO back to NEW please check if the bug still persists with the 3.5.0 beta1 or beta2 prereleases. Details on how to test the 3.5.0 beta1 can be found at: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/QA/BugHunting_Session_3.5.0.-1 more detail on this bulk operation: http://nabble.documentfoundation.org/RFC-Operation-Spamzilla-tp3607474p3607474.html
An EasyHack should have been checked by developers and thus is confirmed regardless of age. Moving back to NEW from NEEDINFO again. Sorry for the hassle.
Deteted "Easyhack" from summary
Does the issue still have value ? We now have only 3 repos, which seem quite reliable. You cannot use tarballs for clone since you don't have configure... but you can use them instead of git pull, with awareness of potential changes in the local git working dir. Actually, since configure was never used to retrieve source files, I don't see the point of this EasyHack.
It is possible to build from source tar-balls; but we no longer up-load these weekly. So - closing wontfix for now.
Migrating Whiteboard tags to Keywords: (EasyHack) [NinjaEdit]