Difficulty checking out a snapshot based on date or revision

Hello,

I'm confused by svn's behavior with respect to checking
out a repository as of a specific date or revision.

For v1.2.1 (r15230) on two different machines, v1.2.3 (r15833)
on another machine, and v1.3.0 (r17949) on four other machines,
I get

  svn: Syntax error in revision argument '2005-12-09'

for commands like

  svn co -r {2005-12-09} svn+ssh://machine/svnroot/old/path
  svn co -r {"2005-12-09"} svn+ssh://machine/svnroot/old/path
  svn co -r {'2005-12-09'} svn+ssh://machine/svnroot/old/path
  svn co -r "2005-12-09" svn+ssh://machine/svnroot/old/path
  svn co -r '2005-12-09' svn+ssh://machine/svnroot/old/path

or if I play with escaping the braces like so,

  svn co -r '{2005-12-09}' svn+ssh://machine/svnroot/old/path
  svn co -r "{2005-12-09}" svn+ssh://machine/svnroot/old/path
  svn co -r \{2005-12-09\} svn+ssh://machine/svnroot/old/path

svn fails trying to check out the current revision (18628) due
to the old/path that does not exist in the current revision,

  svn: File not found: revision 18628, path '/old/path'

Even specifying the revision number corresponding to that
date, e.g.,

  svn co -r 17019 svn+ssh://machine/svnroot/old/path
  svn co svn+ssh://machine/svnroot/old/path_at_17019

fails with the same behavior (svn tries to check out the
current revision but fails due to obsolete path).

But for the oldest version, v1.1.4 (r13838), on a fifth
machine, svn behaves as advertised in the book.

What's up?

I've scoured bug reports, the manuals, the fax, Google,
release notes, the tracker, but the closest thing I could
find was,

  http://subversion.tigris.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=2349

Surely, this behavior is due to some user error on my part?

Thanks,

-- 
Bil Kleb
http://fun3d.larc.nasa.gov
Note: the machines span x86, x86_64, ppc, and irix64
architectures; WindowsXP (mingw), GNU/Linux, OS X, and
Irix OSs; and bash and tcsh shells.  The OS X ppc with
bash happens to be the combination that works.
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