How to undo an 'svn copy'

Question

I've accidentally overwritten an old branch by copying trunk over it using 'svn copy'. More specifically, for every release, trunk is branched and kept as a tag, using:

svn copy svn://machine/REPOS/trunk svn://machine/REPOS/tags/$RELEASENR

But this time the value of 'RELEASENR' was that of an old existing branch instead of a new one. Anybody have any ideas on how to undo this mistake? Thanks already!

Answer 1

Subversion doesn't work that way. You haven't actually overwritten it. If the target of the copy or a move exists and is a directory, then the copied or moved item is placed in that directory:

svn copy svn://machine/REPOS/trunk svn://machine/REPOS/tags/EXISTS_ALREADY

If you look, you should find:

svn://machine/REPOS/tags/EXISTS_ALREADY/trunk 

Which is a copy of the trunk you just tried to tag. The fix in this case is easy:

svn mv svn://machine/REPOS/tags/EXISTS_ALREADY/trunk \
       svn://machine/REPOS/tags/CORRECT_TAG_NAME

(In case you're not *nix conversant: The \ means I've broken one logical line into two physical lines to spare your horizontal scrollbar from overwork.)

Answer 2

In order to undo

svn cp OLDFOLDER NEWFOLDER

if the change has not yet been committed, just use

svn revert NEWFOLDER --depth=infinity

Answer 3

You can undo your last revision by merging back to the previous revision. See http://anilsaldhana.blogspot.com/2007/11/svn-undo-change.html

svn merge --revision 92:91 .

and then commit