svn: Item <folder> is out of date

Question

[answer auto-selected by bounty system against my will]

I'm using subclipse, and always when delete a folder in Eclipse, and try to commit it, the following errors raise:

svn: Item <folder> is out of date
svn: DELETE of <folder>: 409 Conflict (http://myintranet)

Deleting and commiting via command line works fine, but what's wrong with doing it via subclipse? Is anyone more experiencing this problem?

(I experienced this problem in Ubuntu 9.10 and 10.04; last Eclipse version; and subclipse 1.4 - as the next versions of subclipse have much more bugs)

--updated: Its when I delete folders, not files

Answer 1

Isn't that addressed by the Subclipse FAQ?

Whenever you see "out of date" in an error message it means that the revision of the item in the repository is newer than the copy in your local working copy.
The solution is always going to be to run an update, so that your working copy is up to date with the repository, and then do the commit again (assuming that the update did not generate any conflicts).

• For files, this is usually pretty easy to understand how and why this happens.
• However, Subversion also versions folders, and it is usually with folders that this problem most often happens.
  Subversion does not allow you to delete/rename a folder OR change its versioned properties, UNLESS the local copy of the folder is at the HEAD revision of the folder in the repository.

Your next question might be:
"OK, I can maybe understand that, but why is my folder out of date? I am the only person working in this repository."

That is a valid question, the answer lies in the way that Subversion works.
When you commit a change to a file, the revision of the file in your working copy is updated to that new revision when the commit completes, however the version of the parent folder(s) of that file is not updated.
This is because there may have been adds/deletes to other files in that folder and until you have run an update, the folder is not really at that new revision.
This is called "mixed revision working copies".

In summary, the answer is always to do an update so that the folder or file is updated to its HEAD revision.

---

About "Mixed Revision Working Copies":

One special kind of flexibility is the ability to have a working copy containing files and directories with a mix of different working revision numbers.

One of the fundamental rules of Subversion is that a “push” action does not cause a “pull,” nor vice versa.
Just because you're ready to submit new changes to the repository doesn't mean you're ready to receive changes from other people.

The fact is, every time you run svn commit your working copy ends up with some mixture of revisions.
The things you just committed are marked as having larger working revisions than everything else. After several commits (with no updates in between), your working copy will contain a whole mixture of revisions

(and that is why, I believe, you cannot reproduce your "out of date" message on subsequent commits with folder deleted: your update did solve the "mixed revision" state.)

Mixed revisions have limitations

You cannot commit the deletion of a file or directory that isn't fully up to date.
If a newer version of the item exists in the repository, your attempt to delete will be rejected to prevent you from accidentally destroying changes you've not yet seen.