Trying to ignore a file in svn

Question

We use maven and svn. It was an mistaken checkin of target directory to SVN that cause this error. I removed target from the repository:

svn delete -m "removing target folder" https://svn/svn/playground/denizatak/lrms-1.5-0_release_7/target/

Committed revision 19955.

and add ignore property regarding target:

svn proplist -v
Properties on '.':
  svn:ignore : target

However when I try to commit the project I got this message:

svn commit -m "licensing latest version - without target"
svn: Commit failed (details follow):
svn: Directory '/project/target/.svn' containing working copy admin area is missing

When I check the status of the target file separetly I got this message:

svn stat target
svn: Directory 'target/.svn' containing working copy admin area is missing

The status of the project is:

svn st
~      target
M      some files
M      pom.xml

Does anyone have any suggestion about this case?

Answer 1

Did you try just removing the target directory from your project folder? As a precaution you could first move it somewhere else.

Subversion might just be confused by the fact that target appears to be part of a working copy (it has a .svn subdirectory) but is neither part of the current directory in your repository (you deleted it) nor is it defined as svn:externals.

Answer 2

you appear to have corrupted or deleted your .svn directory that contains information about the link between the repo and the local directory.

First try a 'svn clean' to try and rebuild this, possibly 'svn update' too to fetch the details from the repo. If this fails, the easiest way (and the one that gives me most confidence against things going wrong) is to checkout a new working copy, then copy your changed files (NOT the .svn directories) across to there. Then checkin.

I'm not sure about the ~ on the svn st result, it means the object was changed type (eg a file has become a directory or similar), I would have expected it to show with a D for deleted, though I imagine you've added a property to a working-copy item that's no longer part of source control - and it's this that's causing confusion. I would post your question to the svn users mailing list to see if this kind of workflow is something that is known as a bug.