Question

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How do I “un-checkout” a subfolder using TortoiseSVN?

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What have I tried:

• Delete the entire subfolder
• Export-in-place, i.e. exporting the folder on top of itself
• Search SO for things like undo+svn+checkout
• Peek inside the hidden .svn folders to see if I could manually edit things

The first two options seemed to work at first, but when I hit Check for modifications on the top-level folder it would tell me the subfolder and its contents were “missing”. This is of course not what I want.

To make things clearer, the relevant bit of my folder structure is similar to this:

//Repository/trunk/...
//Repository/branches
                     /some-feature-branch1/...
                     /some-feature-branch2/...
                     /some-feature-branch3/...
                     /some-feature-branch4/...
                     etc.

In the past I’ve done the following:

• Check out the //Repository/branches folder locally, without recursively grabbing the content.
• Made individual check-outs of some (but not all) feature branch subfolders

I’m trying to remove -say- some-feature-branch3 from my local disk, but this always leads to status “missing” for the subfolder, when checking the “branches” folder for modifications.

Note that I’d prefer a way to fix this using TortoiseSVN, but if it isn’t possible a command-line fix would be an acceptable alternative.

Answer 1

In SVN 1.7 you can do svn up --set-depth exclude some-feature-branch3 (not sure if you can do it in SVN 1.6).

In Tortoise you can right click on some-feature-branch3 -> ‘Update to Revision’ -> ‘Update Depth: Exclude’ -> ‘Make Depth Sticky’.

If you can’t do it in 1.6 you can do the same trick only with depth empty. It will leave the directory itself, but it will be empty which is enough for most practical purposes.