Error "xx has no ancestry information"

Hi!

I just stumbled across the problem that I got this error message when trying
to commit a directory, but didn't have the same problem when committing files
from within the directory.

How to reproduce:
I'm not 100% sure, but I'll try to describe here what (probably) lead to this
effect. We have a repository layout

  foo/bar
  foo/bar/baz1
  foo/bar/baz2

which is checked out to a WC. Now, for some reason I needed to add a folder to
foo/bar that is not at the according place in the repository, so the path
foo-wc/bar/blub in fact leads to bla/blub of the repository. Now, what I did
was to simply remove the .svn folder from foo-wc/bar. Now we have these
folders:

  foo-wc
  foo-wc/.svn
  foo-wc/bar
  (foo-wc/bar/.svn <- deleted!)
  foo-wc/bar/baz1
  foo-wc/bar/baz1/.svn
  foo-wc/bar/baz2
  foo-wc/bar/baz2/.svn
  foo-wc/bar/blub
  foo-wc/bar/blub/.svn

My expectation was that I now had three separate WCs in the path foo-wc/bar.
This mostly did work, I could update and diff files in each WC, I could even
commit single files there, but I could not commit the whole WC. If I tried
that, I got the mentioned error.

Notes:
1. Yes, you could call it stupidity on my side that I messed with the .svn dir
at all.
2. Once I also removed foo-wc/.svn, I could again use the WC completely, it
seems that then they are really detached from each other.
3. The error-message is _very_ misleading. The only place that the SVN book
talks about 'ancestry' is where it discusses relations between files in
different revisions. This is also the main reason I post here, because only
reading and understanding some sources (which not every user is capable of)
finally lead me to trying to remove the parent folder's .svn dir, too.

It would be very helpful if this message could be enhanced. The main issue is
that foo-wc seems to be the root of the WC, but that foo-wc/bar is missing
the Subversion metadata, right? If so, I would simply say so!

Further, why is this an error at all? There is a directory with complete
metadata and in another context it could well serve as WC, so why disallow
committing through it?

Uli

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