SVN - Skipped paths

Question

I received this message when I ran a SVN UP:

Skipped 'trunk/scripts/accountability_survey_report.php'
At revision 1585.
Summary of conflicts:
  Skipped paths: 1

I've been googling trying to figure out exactly what this means and how to resolve it. I tried deleting the file and then just svn up again, but I get the following:

Restored 'trunk/scripts/accountability_survey_report.php'
Skipped 'trunk/scripts/accountability_survey_report.php'
At revision 1585.
Summary of conflicts:
  Skipped paths: 1

Any help is appreciated.

Answer 1

I've seen the "Skipped paths" message when I've done a previous merge on the working copy and then reverted it. Then the file is added in the first merge but not deleted when you revert the working copy, the second merge tries to add the file but skips because the file already exists.

Answer 2

This SO question might help you. The answer it gives is:

Never, ever, forget to commit a run of svnmerge.py before doing something else. Combining a merge with other edits is a recipe for a disaster, and the disaster is what you see in the question.

The SVN Book also says:

Whatever the case, the “skipped” message means that the user is most likely comparing the wrong two trees; they're the classic sign of driver error. When this happens, it's easy to recursively revert all the changes created by the merge (svn revert --recursive), delete any unversioned files or directories left behind after the revert, and re-run svn merge with different arguments.

And then there's this blog post that claims:

I finally found a posting with instructions on how to merge in spite of the “Skipped” error message… so I tried it, and it worked (in spite of the misleading messages). The trick really is to ignore the messages.

Note that following the merge, files that are in the source branch and not in the destination branch need to be svn added before they will end up in the destination.

It seems the general consensus is that you need to do a proper merge of the file in question.

Answer 3

I know this sounds simple but I'm going to post it just in case anyone else made the same mistake as me. Make certain you are updating from the correct directory. I got this error when I pressed svn up from the wrong directory.