Did you shorten it to "$FreeBSD$" by hand? It might be nice to do this automatically in the get-orig-source step.
After some testing: The keywords are not expanded for old svn: $ svn --version svn, version 1.6.17 (r1128011) compiled Jun 7 2013, 08:51:48 $ svn export https://svn0.us-west.freebsd.org/base/releng/10.1/sys/sys/queue.h They are expanded with current svn $ svn --version svn, version 1.8.10 (r1615264) compiled Sep 25 2014, 06:15:56 on x86_64-pc-kfreebsd-gnu And they are not expanded with current svn, when exported using $ svn --ignore-keywords export https://svn0.us-west.freebsd.org/base/releng/10.1/sys/sys/queue.h Petr