Question

When I did svn update and SVN asked me about a few differences, I told it to postpone them.

Now I would like to resolve them, but svn update just tells me “up to date”, even though svn diff shows me the differences.

How do I make svn update ask me about the conflicts again?

Answer 1

svn update won’t ask about the conflicts again because it has dealt with them.

As for the meaning of svn status, The ? files are not managed by SVN, the M ones have been modified, and the C ones are the conflicted ones that you postponed. If you open one of the C files, and look through it you will see markers in your code showing you where the conflicts are. You need to edit each one of these, fix the conflicts and remove the markers. And then you need to run svn resolve to tell SVN that things are OK. Make sure to use the --help option and Google to learn how svn resolve works before you run it.

If you don’t do all of this, svn commit will no longer work.

svn status is really important to understand, because svn diff only shows things that happened locally after svn update. But, svn status -u gives an overview after querying the repository. Most importantly, it clearly identifies files with conflicts (C in column 1) which you have to open in an editor and check manually.