I thought about it and in fact i may have an idea why we did all those repo shifting :
In the first one we wanted SVN instead of SF’s CVS (SF had no SVN at the time)
In the second one it may have because of the way new chronicles were developed (and maybe still are) : when the first korean PTS of a new major version came out a few devs would download it and start working on it. usually there were some breaking protocol changes at the level of authentication and/or encryption then we had to fix the “main” packets such as CharSelectionInfo, NpcInfo, CharInfo, UserInfo… so that we could at least get into the game and detect other obvious breaking changes (id reorganization for example). Then we would just extract all the new packets and test them to understand their funcionalities, and review old packets for new fields…
wow i got waaaay out of subject, anyway what i meant was that we developed the upcoming version behind the scene for a few month, in an other repo and instead of merging changes at the moment of release we would just open the other repo.
For the final switch, it was as Lecter said because of he poor bandwidth on opensvn