speedo Error 2, download swdb.lst failed

[murphy]

Hi all - during a routine build of gnupg-2.1.21 for Ubuntu 16.04 LTS a
speedo build from source that has consistently worked as recently as a
few days ago has now consistently hung up.  This is true on a Raspberry
Pi 3 armhf environment as well as Ubuntu linux.  The offending command
seems to be:

$ sudo make -f build-aux/speedo.mk native INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr/local
[sudo] password for murphy:
make -f /home/murphy/Downloads/gnupg-2.1.21/build-aux/speedo.mk
UPD_SWDB=1 TARGETOS=native WHAT=release WITH_GUI=0 all
make[1]: Entering directory '/home/murphy/Downloads/gnupg-2.1.21'
download of swdb.lst failed.
/home/murphy/Downloads/gnupg-2.1.21/build-aux/speedo.mk:272: *** Error
getting GnuPG software version database.  Stop.
make[1]: Leaving directory '/home/murphy/Downloads/gnupg-2.1.21'
build-aux/speedo.mk:72: recipe for target 'native' failed
make: *** [native] Error 2

Has there been a recent change affecting swdb.lst???  I have been using
the provided speedo method for years and have never encountered this
problem before.  It is now reproducible even on installations where it
previously succeeded in installing gnupg-2.1.21.

Thanks in advance, Murphy