Subversion: Working copy is old development version

Question

I'm developing on OSX, and one of my Subversion working copies just started returning the following error for all commands, however my other checkouts work fine. I get the same message with both my Brew installed SVN binaries as well as my Cornerstone client, but other working directories are fine. ``` > svn update svn: E155036: Please see the 'svn upgrade' command svn: E155036: Working copy '/working_directory' is an old development version (format 12); to upgrade it, use a format 18 client, then use 'tools/dev/wc-ng/bump-to-19.py', then use the current client > svn upgrade svn: E155019: Can't upgrade '/working_directory' as it is not a pre-1.7 working copy directory svn: E150000: Missing default entry ``` I don't have the `bump-to-19.py` script anywhere on my computer (according to `find / -type f -name bump-to-19.py`), however I think I was able to find it on the Apache repository. That said, I am not familiar with what it does, or how to use it. Ideally I can avoid checking out a…

Accepted Answer

Although I was not able to figure out why my working directory was corrupted, I was able to work around it using `rsync` - there is an option, `C`, that will ignore CVS/SVN files and directories when making a backup. I made a backup using this option, checked out the project again, and then copied the backup back over the new working directory. SVN is happy again.

```
> rsync -arC working_directory working_directory_no_svn
> rm -rf working_directory
> svn co https://svn.example.com/project/trunk working_directory
> rsync -ar working_directory_no_svn working_directory
```

Subversion: Working copy is old development version

Solution

Problem