Question

I have some source code and I imported it into SVN. I forgot to update or check out it and made some changes to the files.

Now (understandably) SVN does not allow me to commit these changes. It says:

svn:
‘/home/name/folder’ is
not a working copy

What can I do now to commit these changes?

Answer 1

The error you are seeing: “svn: ‘/home/name/folder’ is not a working copy” has nothing to do with not having run update. It means what is says:

/home/name/folder is not a working copy.

Here’s a guess at what’s happening:

1. You imported a project (we’ll call it “folder”) into subversion.
2. You neglected to check it out (svn chekout svn://MYREPO/FOLDER folder).
3. You worked on the originally imported folder, which is not a working copy.
4. Now you’re stuck.

Here’s my suggestion for a solution:

1. check out your “folder” from svn already!

svn co svn://MYREPO/FOLDER folder.svn 

2. copy your edited files from ‘folder’ into ‘folder.svn’, replacing the copies that were there.

rsync -r folder/ folder.svn

3. run svn status. you should see that there are local changes.

4. don’t forget to add any new files with svn add.

5. svn commit your changes.

6. throw out ‘folder’. work in ‘folder.svn’ from now on.