SVN commit failed: Directory out of date

Question

I have a problem that seems very simple but is hard to solve. I get the mentioned error after deleting a directory. I did not find a solution yet to solve the conflict. This is how it occurs:

 svn add dir svn add dir/file1 svn commit svn add dir/file2 svn commit svn delete dir svn commit --> commit failed   --> Directory '/dir' is out of date 

The obvious solution 'svn update'does not work. After svn update a next commit fails with:

 Commit failed Directory '/dir' remains in conflict. 

In the meanwhile I found a solution but it is a bit cumbersome:

 svn resolve --accept working dir svn commit --> still fails svn update svn commit --> still fails svn resolve --accept working dir svn commit --> NO PROBLEM! 

Two questions: - can anyone explain this behaviour because I am very curious about it - this problem occurs in a perl script in a far more complex situation. Can anyone give me a simple solution with is 'doable' in the perl script?

Answer 1

Just make a svn update and then your commit should work.

Answer 2

If I understand subversion correctly, the problem is this:

Subversion tracks the current revision for each file and directory separately. Whenever a change on a file is committed, the revision of the parent directory changes in the repo, but you working copy still has the directory in its old revision.

So in your scenario after adding the file the parent directory in the repo has a higher revision than your working copy. When you try to delete the directory you working on an outdated version.

To resolve:

Do an svn update after adding the file, but before deleting the dir.

In general if you do not want to pull in anybody else's changes, you can restrict the update to the directory itself: svn up --depth empty dir.