Is it safe to delete an svn copy and re-export to the same location?

Question

I've screwed up a certain sub-folder in my svn working copy and now I am unable to commit the entire directory. I am however able to commit individual sub-directories (not too many), and thus have been able to save my work on the whole. If I try to commit the entire working directory, I get a "Unable to lock {PATH}" error. I've tried svn cleanup and a few other ways that haven't worked successfully.

The easiest way for me to continue now, I think, is simply to delete the entire working directory from my system, and re-export the repo version to the same path. It needs to be the same path to map into a certain url on my dev server.

I was wondering if deleting the entire path and then re-exporting it would cause any problems. It really shouldn't because all local svn info is stored in those .svn folders which would be deleted, but still, I'm new to this and I could be wrong.

Any guidance? thanks

Answer 1

You don't want to re-export, but to re-checkout your tree. (An export just exports all the files and folders, without turning them into a working copy from which you could commit changes.)

Unless you have any non-committed changes I don't see what could be wrong. Were I to join your project I would have to checkout first, too, after all.
If you're not sure, though, why don't you keep a copy of the old working copy and checkout into a new one?

Note, however, that it might be faster to just delete the subfolder you messed up and let an update operation on the working copy re-create it from the repository.

Answer 2

Got this to work using resolve eventually.

I had to do svn resolve -working PATH/TO/SUBDIR

Initially the same command was giving me an error, but after hand-modifying the entries file, I was able to get it to work.

If you're stuck in a similar place, play around with resolve, it is most likely the way out.