Tortoise Status: Difficult

Question

I was updating svn, and a couple of folders suddenly became difficult, and cleaning was useless - it reported locks that I could not find or release. I ended up deleting corrupt folders and cleaning.

I think I understand that svn was not able to compare subfolders or something like that.

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 is my svn client out of date?

Answer 1

Most likely, it had nothing to do with another teammate who put something in the SVN repository in order to affect your working copy.

Working copies are a great Subversion innovation, but sometimes they just break down from usage and abuse, and a new check is required. This can be exacerbated if you have local changes.

Now obstacles can be caused by several things. Firstly, the working copy is simply won. He broke it, cleaning will not fix it. Secondly, it can become an obstacle because you have another window, application, or process that holds the file or directory that you are trying to commit. This is especially true for Windows and TortoiseSVN.

Are you sure that you did not have command line windows, other applications, or even Windows window files listed in these directories?

Answer 2

This can also happen if you have a symbolic link to the SVN directory. If you click Commit from the actual directory, that will be fine, but if you select Commit on a symbolic link, it will say that the directory is locked.

Answer 3

I saw this yesterday on a client machine that was trying to use TortoiseSVN version 1.4.x against my 1.6.x server. He had problems with large commits and ended up failing. He left a working copy in a disordered state and could not fix it even after cleaning.

Installing the latest version fixed everything. (still it was necessary to blow away the screened working copy and check the fresh one, though)

Answer 4

I had the same problem when trying to add a directory to my repo that was already a version elsewhere. After removing the svn links, the conflict led to obstruction.

I changed the name of the culprit folder, and it did a trick that I was able to add and commit.
Somehow ToirtoiseSVN kept a link to the folder name and changing it was a successful workaround.