Hi,
terrasync has used SVN to synchronize scenery files to the local harddrive for many years. In February 2016, a much simpler, more fault tolerant and less resource hungry transport via plain HTTP was introduced in the development branch. After almost three month of development, testing and preparing the necessary infrastructure, the client switched from SVN to HTTP with release 2016.3.1. All versions since that release now use terrasync over http, the SVN client has been completely removed. A manual syncing tool using this transport exists (terrasync.py) and also the current version of terramaster uses plain http.
As a result of the client switch, the requests for the svn-server web service have decreased by more than 90%. The remaining SVN users originate from 2016.2.1 (85%), from 2016.1.1 (7%) and a few are from even older fg versions, bots and a very smal number of Java clients.
Maintaining the SVN repository consumes a lot of resources and computing power. I would like to stop distributing scenery via SVN with the next release of 2017.1 early next year unless somebody can come up with a good reason to continue with this service.
Everybody running FlightGear 2016.2 or later, please consider updating to a newer version or think about syncing scenery manually using terrasync.py.
There is no change for users of FlightGear 2016.3.1 or newer.
Torsten