Why do I get a Red Exclamation after I have done a Update?

Question

I have Tortoise SVN installed and am using it in Windows Explorer. A colleague has updated some files I assume because I had a exclamation point on some folders. I did a update to get the latest version but I still see a red exclamation point.

Answer 1

A Red exclamation mark tells you that you have modified these files in your working copy, so to get rid of the exclamation marks, you have to either commit the files (update the version in the repository with your modified version) or revert them (throwing away your changes).

Answer 2

@Frank is quite correct on the staleness indicator but--based on your followup comments in his answer--it sounds like your concern is getting a handle on other people's edits rather than your own edits. Many developers, as you intimated, periodically do an update to freshen the working copy with commits from others, the canonical "pull" model (vs. the "push" model).

Let me digress a moment to shift views to justify my next point more clearly. Consider the typical bug tracking system using the pull model: when others submit or update bugs, you need to go to the website (or client) and search and filter and check for what might have changed on issues you are interested in. Some systems support only that. But the better ones also support the push model: you can subscribe to projects or specific issues so that when something new is posted you automatically receive an email. (I could not work well without this feature!)

The situation is analogous in the subversion domain. Yes, I frequently do an svn update to absorb all changes, but I find it quite helpful to be notified when something I have keen interest in is changed by someone else. And doing this is simple: download Stefan Kung's CommitMonitor that adds push technology to Subversion. This tool sits in the system tray on a Windows system, and lets you specify any number of repositories, either at the root, or at any subdirectory, so you can adjust the resolution as fine as you like. Don't mean to sound like an advertisement--I have no connection with the product or author--but I just found this quite recently and I have found it simple to use, unobtrusive, and clean--it just works.