Renamed file, now SVN not allowing me to commit?

svn commit
froadie picture froadie · Feb 5, 2014 · Viewed 49.7k times · Source

I'm developing a ColdFusion website using Aptana. We're using SVN for version control.

I renamed a few files and am now trying to commit one of them, but I'm getting the following error:

'SVN Commit' has encountered a problem.
org.apache.subversion.javahl.ClientException: Illegal target for the requested operation
svn: Commit failed (details follow):
svn: Cannot commit 'R:\myPath\My-New-File-Name.cfm' because it was moved from 'R:\myPath\My-Old-File-Name.cfm' which is not part of the commit; both sides of the move must be committed together

This seems to indicate that I need to commit both the previous file (that was renamed) and the new renamed file together. How can I commit a file that no longer exists...?

Answer

gbjbaanb picture gbjbaanb · Feb 5, 2014

Commit the directory, not the file.

Think of a directory as a text file containing the list of files it contains, then you can see that to commit successfully, you need to update the directory itself so it can remove the old entry and add the new entry. This will show up in SVN as deleting the old and adding the new file (ie 2 changes to the directory, not 1 change to the file)

If only want to commit the 1 file, you will need to add the other changed files to an ignore list temporarily.

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