When files exist in the repo filesystem, the "empty repository" text should never show up on the page, but sometimes it does. For example, during an SVN import. We've seen this with git too.
E.g. (at the time of this writing) see https://sourceforge.net/p/test-brondsem0/svn/ and https://svn.code.sf.net/p/test-brondsem0/svn/
We've gotten more reports of this.
This seems to be working fine