Remove SVN Directory does not delete locally

Question

I am trying to figure out why a directory in my svn project still appears on my localhost even though another developer deleted it from the svn repo when he did his last commit. Any reason why it would still be there when I did svn update?

Answer 1

What you describe is indeed the default behavior of svn. I think the reason is to avoid that your version of the directory with local changes is removed (i.e. you don't loose changes not committed to the repo just because somebody else has decided to remove the directory).

In practice this is a bit annoying, since most of the times none of your colleagues have made modifications to the directory you have removed, but all of them have to remove it manually. And it could be solved in a different way (e.g. not allowing the update of the removed directory with local modifications unless you use --force)

Just by looking at the documentation, I think they've fixed it for version 1.8 (I have not used it though, I cannot confirm). In particular, look at this warning,

The behavior of the --keep-local option does not propagate to other working copies which contain the items you've scheduled for deletion. If you commit the deletion of those items they will remain in your working copy, but they will be deleted from other working copies which contain them when those working copies are then updated.

Hope it helps.