Question

I have been working on a Django project, and I decided that it needed some version control. I have an SVN server running on another machine, and I wanted to import that code into my SVN repository. I am developing on Ubuntu and my SVN server is a remote OS X machine.

I went into my Django project on my development machine, ~/django_projects/myproject, and ran the following command: svn import svn+ssh://[e-mail]/path/to/svn/repo. The result was a whole bunch of files that were added.

Then I modified a couple of files and tried to do a check in: svn ci.

That command gave the following error message: svn: 'path/to/svn/repo' is not a working copy.

What did I do wrong? How do I get my stuff checked into SVN so that I can do proper version control?

Answer 1

This is because svn import doesn’t create a working copy. To fix this, perform these steps:

• first back up your modified files, just in case.
• Run svn co --force svn+ssh://[e-mail]/path/to/svn/repo/path/to/import /path/to/wc where path/to/wc is the root where you want to create your working copy. This checks out the path in the repository to the path you specify as working copy location. The --force parameter will continue checking out even if file present in the repository are already in the working copy. It will not overwrite them
• Run svn status /path/to/wc to verify the files indicates as modified are the ones you meant to change
• Run svn ci