tortoisesvn status:obstructed

Question

i was doing an svn update, and a couple folders suddenly became obstructed, and cleanup was useless - it reported locks that i couldn't find or release. i ended up deleting the offending folders and cleanup worked.

i think i understand that svn wasn't able to compare subfolders or something...

my question is: how did they get that way; is it a local change that caused it, or could it have been another teammate committing something? is my svn client out of date?

Answer 1

This can also happen when you have a symlink to the SVN directory. If you press Commit from the actual directory it's fine, but if you choose Commit on the symlink, it will say the directory is obstructed.