What causes svn commit to fail and report a file/dir as obstructed?

Question

I am pretty much the only person making check ins to the svn repo but for some reason over the past week Tortoise is reported that my WCF Service Reference directory is 'obstructed' and I cant commit my changes. If I have no even made any changes to the contents of that directory, why does svn report obstructed and what does that even mean?

Thanks

Answer 1

You've probably deleted/moved some files / directories directly from the file system, and not through SVN commands. This can sometimes lead to a directory becoming obstructed if it can not work out the differences against the repository.

Try performing a clean-up first, and if that fails, revert that directory and try use SVN commands for changing directory file structure (delete/move).

Answer 2

If the .svn sub-directory is missing the directory is marked obstructed as SVN has no way of knowing the directory's status any more. Most likely clean-up or revert isn't able to fix it, since local svn data is gone, so you got two options:

1. rm the directory and update to get latest working copy
2. if the directory contains valuable, changed stuff, check out the latest working copy in a temp directory and manually copy the missing .svn directories in place, then SVN is again able to make sense of it.

Answer 3

As an addendum to the answer above, I think it's more convenient to rename your current broken directory, check out the latest copy in the right folder, and copy your changed files.

Answer 4

I'd have done the same thing - removed two directories and replaced them with new ones that didn't have .svn directories in.

I dragged the new directories onto my Desktop, committed the changes so that they were showing as missing, and then dragged them back and committed again.