[Andreas Jung]
all changes I made for the last hotfix release (patch for the reST .. include problem) have disappeared from the SVN (both from 2.8 branch and the trunk).
Are you sure? The SVN log on Zope trunk shows what I guess are the relevant checkins, revs 39013 and 39014, on 2005-10-09, both with checkin comment update to docutils 0.3.9 If that's it, they appear to be there. There is a problem with them, though: the svn:eol-style property isn't set to "native" on any of the files added by these checkins, so they look like gibberish under many Windows tools (and, e.g., windiff thinks every line differs between the SVN Zope trunk and CVS Zope 2.7 branch copies of docutils). While Python doesn't care (Linux-style .py files work fine on Windows), that should get fixed.
... Is there something broken with the SVN database?
Maybe, but don't see any real evidence of that yet.