"svn: Won't delete locally modified directory ..."

Greetings. I tried searching for this error around the subversion site
(bugs, mailing lists) and couldn't find it, so if this has come up before
and I simply missed it, please feel free to smack me with an "RTFM" and
point me in the right direction.

We've been using subversion happily ever since 1.0. However, one of our
projects has run into a lot of trouble in the past few days. It is now
not uncommon to have to "svn up" multiple times (e.g., 5 or 6 times)
before the full tree is updated. This is with both client and server
version 1.0.5 using svn+ssh:// kinds of repository URLs.

Here's a sample output:

-----
[...snipped previous normal update output...]
U mca/Makefile.am
svn: Won't delete locally modified directory 'mca'
svn: Left locally modified or unversioned files
Exit 1
earth[11:02]:~/ompi/src >svn update
svn: Won't delete locally modified directory 'mca'
svn: Left locally modified or unversioned files
Exit 1
earth[11:02]:~/ompi/src >cd mca/
earth[11:02]:~/ompi/src/mca >svn up
svn: Won't delete locally modified directory ''
svn: Left locally modified or unversioned files
Exit 1
earth[11:02]:~/ompi/src/mca >svn up
svn: Won't delete locally modified directory ''
svn: Left locally modified or unversioned files
Exit 1
earth[11:03]:~/ompi/src/mca >svn up
   U .
Updated to revision 1360.
earth[11:03]:~/ompi/src/mca >
------

Note that the directory "mca" has *NOT* been deleted (nor should it be --
no one did "svn rm mca; svn ci mca"). So I'm not sure why the svn client
is complaing about not deleting it. But in addition to complaining about
it, it totally stops the "svn update" process. Hence, you have to run
"svn up" multiple times to get current (it *usually* seems to clear the
problem the next time you run "svn up", but see the above example where it
took 4 "sun up"'s to clear the problem in the "src/mca" directory).

This does not seem to be a race condition on the server; in this
particular example, all of my developers needed to run "svn up" 4 times to
clear the error (although some just did "rm -rf trunk; svn co ...."),
sometimes running a few hours after each other (i.e., I had to go explain
"run 'svn up' a few more times..." to each of them ;-) ).

We're not sure exactly what triggers this problem -- we have moved a few
files and directories in the past few days, as well as edit svn:ignore on
various directories. Could that have something to do with it?

Are we doing something wrong? (please feel free to ping me for more
information)

My developers are getting quite frustrated. I'm the local SVN evangelist
(SVN is great! CVS sucks! Woo hoo!), so I figured I'd ping this list and
see if anyone else has run into this problem.

-- 
{+} Jeff Squyres
{+} jsquyres@lam-mpi.org
{+} http://www.lam-mpi.org/
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