How to update an SVN branch made with svn-copy?

Question

noob question I know, but all resources I found fail or gave me the new problem.

I have few branches in my SVN repo. All developers get access to his personal branch. Each branch was made by a copy from the beta branch.

svn copy  svn://192.168.0.2/svn/example/branches/beta
svn://192.168.0.2/svn/example/branches/dev/devN

Now when dev1 finished to work, he merge his work in beta (pwd = ./beta/)

svn merge svn://192.168.0.2/svn/example/branches/dev/dev1@4242 .

Well, my question is, how other dev could update her own branch to the latest beta with dev1 change?

when dev2 do a merge (after commited his own change | pwd = ./dev/dev2)

svn merge svn://192.168.0.2/svn/example/branches/beta@4242 .

He get this message:

svn: E195016: Merge tracking not allowed with missing subtrees; try restoring these items first:
pointing his files. -> impossible to merge.

Is there a way to "update" a branch copy?

Answer 1

That error message occurs when someone deletes something without telling Subversion about it. If you were to run svn status on that working copy the same path that Subversion is complaining about should show with a ! in the first column of the output. Usually this means that someone used an OS command to delete paths rather than a svn command.

If you really want the paths to be deleted then you can fix this by telling Subversion about this by doing using the svn rm command. The paths will show as deleted with a D in the first column of status output and your merge should proceed (though you might have tree conflicts).

If you want the gory details see issue #2915 from the Subversion project that explains why this error message was added.

Answer 2

If you are working in windows and the path exceeds 256 characters, Windows will start being nasty about things. I usually get around this by creating the workspace directly under a short directory in root file system (e.g. C:\WRK) This will use a path much shorter than C:\Users\user_name\Desktop\ directory. Once I have my workspace created, I add a shortcut to my desktop for easy access.