Subversion ‘is missing or not locked’ error

Recently I was doing some work on a few PHP scripts, and came by a rather annoying error while trying to commit to subversion:

svn: Commit failed (details follow):
svn: Working copy '/srv/www/htdocs/newcall/stats/generated' is missing or not locked

The problem was a directory, “generated”. This particular app makes use of libchart to draw simple charts in PHP. Libchart writes the charts to files, and therefore needs a directory writable by the Apache user. So, I created the generated/ directory for these output files, and chowned wwwrun:www. Now, apparently, the subversion svn add command doesn’t check ownership/writable permissions before adding a directory. So, it added generated/ to the main list of files, but couldn’t write the .svn directory and add a lock. IMHO, this is an error in the svn client.

I couldn’t find any solutions to the problem online. Essentially, I have an empty directory (or at least nothing useful in it) that got partially added to svn - it was added to the .svn/entries file in the parent directory, but never had its own .svn directory created.

The only solution that I found is to manually edit the .svn/entries file in the parent directory. WARNING: this isn’t for the faint of heart. Be sure you don’t screw anything up.

1. Open the .svn/entries file in the parent directory in a text editor (i.e. if the problem directory is stats/generated, edit stats/.svn/entries
2. Find the entry node with the correct “name” attribute for the directory in question. For stats/generated, in the stats/.svn/entries file, it should look like:

<entry
   name="generated"
   kind="dir"
   schedule="add"/>

1. Make the entries file writable (chmod u+w entries)
2. Remove the entry from the file.
3. Set the entries file back to non-writable (chmod u-w entries)
4. Remove any save files if they were created (i.e. entries~ for emacs)
5. Remove the directory itself and re-create it, this time adding to svn before setting the ownership.
6. Commit. It should now work.