This morning started off to a rough start. I came in to realize the commit of a merge I made at the end of the day yesterday had failed. Whenever I would attempt to commit the merge changes, it would go through the entire process and then finally fail with a error message of:

org.tigris.subversion.javahl.ClientException: Working copy text base is corrupt

After trying a "Cleanup" and several other steps to rectify the problem, I finally did hit Google to try and find a solution. I came across chris' subversion checksum mismatch - easy workaround which offered several various solutions to the problem.

I tried several of the solutions, but wasn't haven't much success until I came across Michael Sparer's comment:

Thanks for the explanation, which shed some light on how svn manages its working copy. My problem seemed to stem from a bogus file under .svn/text-base, which didn't match the file actually on the server.
- server file (.../x.java): OK
- orig copy from server (.svn/text-base/x.java.svn-base): BOGUS (not same as server)
- checksum (in .svn/entries): matches server, but not server copy

If I can make the bogus copy match what's on the server, then it will also match the checksum, and everyone will be happy.
What I did (i'll call the working dir with the corrupt file "orig-dir":
1. Fresh checkout of svn dir matching orig-dir into /tmp/blah
2. Copy /tmp/blah/.svn/text-base/x.java.svn-base into orig-dir/.svn/text-base
3. Check in successfully

I wish svn would let you refresh a given file from the server...maybe there's a command and I just haven't found it or my svn is too old.

In the end, this ended up being my problem as well. The copy of me .svn/text-base/filename.ext.svn-base was out of sync with the actually copy on the server.

To resolve this, I checked out a clean copy from the server to a tmp folder, then I just replaced the copy in my working folder. After doing this, I was able to check in the file without incident.

NOTE:

I also noticed I had a copy of the template in the .svn/tmp/text-base/ folder. I made a copy of this file and then removed the file this directory before committing. I'm not sure if this step is necessary, but I wanted my local working copy to mirror as closely as possible a fresh working copy.

I could have just wiped my local copy altogether, but I wanted to know the root problem incase it every happens again. Since I have a pretty large repository it takes a while to checkout from SVN, so at least know I have an option to try if I ever run into the issue again that won't require me checking out the entire working directory structure.

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