Error checking out Subversion repository (svn: Your .svn/tmp directory may be missing or corrupt;)

Question

I am trying to check out a full subversion repository including all branches and tags:

svn co svn+ssh://path/to/project

This runs for a while, but during the checkout of a branch I get the following error:

svn: Your .svn/tmp directory may be missing or corrupt; run 'svn cleanup' and try again
svn: Can't open file 'project\branches\BRANCH\source\java\com\bS\.svn\tmp\text-base\Event.java.svn-base': The system cannot find the path specified.

So I tried to checkout the branch manually by doing:

svn co svn+ssh://path/to/project/branches/BRANCH

This runs fines and I get the branch. I can then copy the branch into the branches directory of the full project and continue with the checkout. But it keeps running into this problem on other branches.

Does anyone have any idea why I can't checkout the branch as part of the overall project, but I can check it out on its own?

Answer 1

You can work around this problem on Windows by specifying the fully qualified path in the parameter to the svn command. For example rather than

c:\dev> svn co http://repoman.example/svn/myproj/trunk myproj

try this

c:\dev> svn co http://repoman.example/svn/myproj/trunk c:\dev\myproj

For some reason path length limits only apply to relative paths.