What does a TortoiseSVN cleanup actually do?

Question

What does a TortoiseSVN cleanup actually do?

I have not found a pattern, but I frequently get asked to do a "cleanup" while trying to commit code.

If TortoiseSVN knows when it's dirty, why doesn't it run a cleanup itself?

Answer 1

Edit: I think it's not automatic as it needs to abort operations and unlock the working copy in /path.

Subversion book:

Recursively clean up the working copy, removing locks and resuming unfinished operations. If you ever get a working copy locked error, run this command to remove stale locks and get your working copy into a usable state again. ” Note that in this context lock refers to local filesystem locking, not repository locking.

It's basically a way of trying to recover any errors that occur with SVN.

Documentation on cleanup:

http://tortoisesvn.net/docs/release/TortoiseSVN_en/tsvn-dug-cleanup.html

"If a Subversion command cannot complete successfully, perhaps due to server problems, your working copy can be left in an inconsistent state. In that case you need to use TortoiseSVN → Cleanup on the folder. It is a good idea to do this at the top level of the working copy.

Cleanup has another useful side effect. If a file date changes but its content doesn't, Subversion cannot tell whether it has really changed except by doing a byte-by-byte comparison with the pristine copy. If you have a lot of files in this state it makes acquiring status very slow, which will make many dialogs slow to respond. Executing a Cleanup on your working copy will repair these “broken” timestamps and restore status checks to full speed."