FreeBSD svn client and https server

We recently moved our Subversion repository to the University’s central svn server.
When I tried to checkout a copy of the repository to a new FreeBSD server today, I got the following error:

svn: Unrecognized URL scheme 'https://svn.web.server'

I checked the output of ‘svn ––version’ and verified that subversion didn’t have anything configured to handle the http[s] protocols.
(Our old server was using the svn+ssh.)
A couple of web searches later, I found that I needed to use the Neon or Serf ports (or both).
Since Neon was listed as one of the defaults in FreeBSD’s subversion Makefile, I modified our /etc/make.conf file to require Neon:

.if ${.CURDIR:M*ports/devel/subversion}
WITH_NEON=foo
...
.endif

Subsequent rebuilding of subversion pulled in the Neon port, as expected,
and ‘svn ––version’ now lists ra_neon as the module handling http and https schemes.
Success!