Reverting changes failed with some skipped paths

Question

I've read this answer: How do I return to an older version of our code in Subversion? and used the command svn merge -r 150:140 . to revert back to an old revision (I didn't need to commit the reverted changes, just get to the old version of files). Before that I had a clean version of repo at revision 150 (no manual changes to files). Unfortunately, I got these warnings:

...
Skipped 'some/file.h'
Skipped 'some/file2.h'
...
Skipped 'some/file3.h'
Skipped 'some/file4.h'
...
Summary of conflicts:
Skipped paths: 4

Which surprises me seeing as all I wanted to do was go back to some old version of files (and I had no changes beforehand).

What could have caused this? How do I get to the old version?

Edit: I've checked and apparently these files don't exist in the currrent version (150) (either on disk or in SVN):

svn: warning: W155010: The node 'some/file.h' was not found.

But they did exist in revision 140. So somewhere along the way they were deleted. But why can't SVN just restore them?

Answer 1

The most common root cause for such a tree conflict is, that your working copy had some changes and then you try to merge - bad things can happen. Just guessing from the output, it could be related to the "some" folder (i.e. if the whole folder was removed between revision 140 and 150 - not just the files; or if you had some local changes in the skipped files before merging).

In case this happens in the future again, try to revert the failed merge by executing:

svn revert --recursive

Back on revision 150 delete any unversioned files & folders from your working copy and rerun the merge by using

svn merge -r 150:140 -v --force .

(-v will display more verbose information, --force will delete files from your working copy, even if they were modified local)

In case everything else fails, the last resort is always to just checkout a fresh working copy from revision 140 into a new local folder using

svn checkout -r 140 $your_url