Although I was not able to figure out why my working directory was corrupted, I was able to work around it using rsync
- there is an option, C
, that will ignore CVS/SVN files and directories when making a backup. I made a backup using this option, checked out the project again, and then copied the backup back over the new working directory. SVN is happy again.
> rsync -arC working_directory working_directory_no_svn
> rm -rf working_directory
> svn co https://svn.example.com/project/trunk working_directory
> rsync -ar working_directory_no_svn working_directory