Probably bug with svn copy

Folks,

While teaching a subversion class yesterday, we came across an
interesting anomaly with svn copy which I believe is a bug.

Here is how to set it up and reproduce the behavior.

a new repository with the following structure is needed for testing:
  myProject
myProject/tags
myProject/trunk
myProject/trunk/Dir1
myProject/trunk/Dir1/SubDir1
myProject/trunk/Dir1/SubDir1/file1.txt
myProject/trunk/Dir2
myProject/trunk/Dir2/SubDir1
myProject/trunk/Dir2/SubDir1/file2.txt
myProject/trunk/Dir3
myProject/trunk/Dir3/SubDir1
myProject/trunk/Dir3/SubDir1/file3.txt

Once you have the repository buit with this structure, create a tag
of each SubDir1 into tags1 in the tags directory and watch what happens:

svn copy myProject/trunk/Dir1/SubDir1 myProject/tags/tag1

A tags/tag1 (I see that file1.txt is in this directory, which is
what I expect)

svn copy myProject/trunk/Dir2/SubDir1 myProject/tags/tag1

A tags/tag1/SubDir1 (for some reason in this case it creates
SubDir1 with file2.txt in it)

svn copy myProject/trunk/Dir3/SubDir1 myProject/tags/tag1

Fails because SubDir1 already exists.

This behavior is inconsistent, what I expected would happen is either:
1- SubDir1 would be created the first time with file1.txt in it and
fail the other 2 times after it
2- file1.txt, file2.txt and file3.txt would all end up in tag1.

However as you can see by testing it is that the behavior is
different for the first 2 copy commands and the third behaves like
the second. Why is subversion changing its behavior on copy? Should
it not provide some kind of consistency and not take a guess on how
to best copy a directory or directory content?

Thanks
R

Robert S. Sfeir
yosemitesam(at)gmailNOSPAM.com

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Received on Tue Apr 12 15:39:24 2005