svn - How do I correct "Commit Failed. File xxx is out of date. xxx path not found."

Question

I have recently run into a particularly sticky issue regarding committing the result of a merge in subversion. Our Subversion server is @ 1.5.0 and my TortoiseSVN client is now @ 1.6.1.

I am trying to merge a feature branch back into my trunk. The merge appears to work okay; however, the commit fails with the following error message.

Commit failed (details follow):
File 
'flex/src/com/penbay/invision/portal/services/http/soap/ReportServices/GetAllBldgsParamsByRegionBySiteResultEvent.as' 
is out of date
'/svn/ibis/!svn/wrk/531d459d-80fa-ea46-bfb4-940d79ee6d2e/visualization/trunk/source/flex/src/com/penbay/invision/portal/services/http/soap/ReportServices/GetAllBldgsParamsByRegionBySiteResultEvent.as' 
path not found
You have to update your working copy first.

My working trunk is up to date. I have even checked out a new one into a different folder to make sure there wasn't any local cruft messing with the merge. I have done some more research into this and I think part of the problem is user error. I think our problems are:

1. We had some developers committing work with a subversion client before 1.5 and some after. I believe this has the potential to corrupt the merge info.
2. In other branches we have performed partial merges. That is, we did not always perform merges at the root of the branch. This was to facilitate updating Flex and .NET efforts within the same branch.
3. We performed cyclic (reflexive) merges on our branch. This was done because we had multiple parallel branches and we wanted to periodically update our branch with the latest code in trunk.

All of these things are explicitly not recommended by the Subversion book/team. We have learned our lesson and now know the best practices. However, we first need to merge and commit our latest branch.

What it the best way to correct the problems we are encountering?

Would deleting all the merge info in the trunk and branch be a viable solution? No. I have done this but it does not resolve the error that I am getting above.

Answer 1

I just had this problem, and the cause seemed to be that a directory had been flagged as in conflict. To fix:

svn update
svn resolved <the directory in conflict>
svn commit