John Smith's Blog

A brief detour from the Fedora/Dell posts...

Maybe there's something about me that's cursed, but it seems that the deletion functionality in Subversion is pretty broken. Pretty much every time I delete a directory, the repo gets out-of-sync, and I have to spend 10 minutes working out how to resolve something that should surely have worked properly first time.

Here's an example. I had a directory called dell in my personal notes archive, that contained a single file, that made more sense to be moved to a different directory in the repo. This was moved with no issues: [john@sofia personal]$ svn mv dell/vodafone.txt dellmini10/ A dellmini10/vodafone.txt D dell/vodafone.txt [john@sofia personal]$ svn commit -m "moved some dell files around" Deleting dell/vodafone.txt Adding dellmini10/vodafone.txt Transmitting file data ... Committed revision 38. Note that I wasn't even attempting to do anything particularly adventurous, such as deleting the directory in the same commit.

I then tried to get rid of this now-empty directory: [john@sofia personal]$ ls dell [john@sofia personal]$ svn rmdir dell Unknown command: 'rmdir' Type 'svn help' for usage. [john@sofia personal]$ svn del dell D dell [john@sofia personal]$ svn commit -m "deleted empty dell directory from repo" Deleting dell svn: Commit failed (details follow): svn: Directory '/dell' is out of date WTF!?! (I hasten to add that no-one else is using this repo.)

There's then lots of random flailing around to try to coax it into working: [john@sofia personal]$ svn up C dell At revision 38. Summary of conflicts: Tree conflicts: 1 [john@sofia personal]$ svn up dell At revision 38. [john@sofia personal]$ svn commit -m "deleted empty dell directory from repo" svn: Commit failed (details follow): svn: Aborting commit: '/data/personal/dell' remains in conflict [john@sofia personal]$ svn stat ... D C dell > local delete, incoming edit upon update ... [john@sofia personal]$ svn resolve --accept mine dell svn: 'mine' is not a valid --accept value [john@sofia personal]$ svn help resolve ... [john@sofia personal]$ svn resolve --accept mine-full dell svn: warning: Tree conflicts can only be resolved to 'working' state; 'dell' not resolved [john@sofia personal]$ svn resolve --accept working dell Resolved conflicted state of 'dell' [john@sofia personal]$ svn status ... D dell ... [john@sofia personal]$ svn up At revision 38. [john@sofia personal]$ svn commit -m "deleted empty dell dir" Deleting dell Committed revision 39.

I guess the svn resolve --accept working {dir} did the trick, but I fail to understand why it was ever necessary. Guess I should really move to git or Mercurial...