Question

I have a VS 2008 project under TortoiseSVN source control. I am the only person using it at present.

I was trying to commit my latest changes when I received the message ‘File abc is out of date – please update’. When I try to update the project, I get a whole set of file conflicts (binary and text). Since I am confident my working copy contains the correct version of the files, I try to resolve the conflicts by selecting ‘mine’ as the correct version. I have also tried just marking each file conflict as resolved. I am then able to commit.

However, following this my VS 2008 project refuses to compile, and gives hundreds of errors (so many errors that VS 2008 reports that there are too many errors to show!). Something about TortoiseSVN’s conflict resolution completely screws up the project, and it refuses to build.

Any way I can force TortoiseSVN to just save my working copy into the repository as the latest revision, without checking for conflicts?

Answer 1

I hope you’ve made a backup of your working copy before updating, because else it is most likely that the conflicts have led to a huge pile of >>>>>> theirs and <<<<<<< mine comments in your source files.

While I don’t understand how the conflicts could happen in the first place (since you are the only one committing to the repository), there is a possible fix.

Move your current, ‘working’ working copy to a safe location. Check out the project completely fresh. Copy your source files over the fresh working copy and then commit the resulting changes.

When your source tree consists of several directories, it might be tedious to copy every directory individually. To overcome this you can export your safe ‘working’ working copy using TortoiseSVN -> Export All. This creates a directory without all .svn files and directories. You can then copy this exported directory over the fresh working copy.