A sane way to rename a directory in subversion working copy

Question

While somehow versed in VCS (regular svn, git and git-svn user) I can\'t seem to wrap my head around this peculiar SVN behavior.

Whenever I need to rename a directory in

Answer 1

svn mv works for me:

C:\svn\co>svn mv my_dir new_dir
A         new_dir
D         my_dir\New Text Document.txt
D         my_dir


C:\svn\co>svn commit -m foo
Raderar             my_dir
Lägger till         new_dir

Arkiverade revision 2.

C:\svn\co>

Sorry for the Swedish output of svn.

There must be something else that is wrong in your case.

Edit:
As pointed out in the comments by Lloeki

To reproduce the behavior you also need to update and commit a file contained in the folder, but not update the folder itself.

file commit creates a new rev n on the repo, but local metadata is not updated (as it has always be, see svn log after any commit) , thus dir metadata is at rev n-1. It follows that svn won't commit because of the metadata diff, and it won't update because there's indeed a conflict on the dir: update metadata vs delete.

The behavior is "expected" and the "solution" is to update the working copy before issuing the svn rename command.