I’ve been using SVN to track my projects, and I’ve run into a problem several times.
svn: Directory “/programming/projects/mydirectory” containing working copy admin area is missing
I bet you’re familiar with that one. What seems to be making this happen is when I try to “svn add” a directory that I don’t have write permission to. Instead of saying “you don’t have permission to do that, try something else,” SVN puts my working copy in a messed-up state where it can’t be updated or checked in.
Why does it do that? That seems like the Wrong Thing. I’ve searched up ways to fix this (the simplest thing seems to be “svn –force delete mydirectory”) but I’m still puzzled as to why SVN can put my working copy in a messed-up state instead of throwing an error message based on a very simple condition.
Basically, there are many many ways to “partially” mess up your working directory.
By experience, I’ve never reached a situation where I’ve been unable to recover and where I had to get local diffs, remove my checkout, recheckout, reapply, …
By playing quite a lot with: svn cleanup, revert/update folders that are in “!”, remove some messy stuff, revert some wrongful adds, you always get back on your feet.
This is obviously a disadvantage, because you have much manual fiddling to do, but on the other hand, it’s probably better to always err on the side of caution: when something unexpected happens, just make sure disk state is consistent is recoverable and stop, let the user see what exactly is wrong, rather than risking to make a bad decision.