Subversion and case-insensitive filesystems

My Mac's filesystem is case-insensitive. It thinks Foo and foo are the same file.

Subversion's filesystem is case-sensitive. It thinks Foo and foo are different files.

As you can imagine, this mismatch has hilarious consequences. If your repository contains a directory with both Foo and foo, then svn crashes hard when you try to checkout that directory:

svn: In directory 'project/src/com/publicobject'
svn: Can't copy 'project/src/com/publicobject/.svn/tmp/text-base/Foo.svn-base' to 'project/src/com/publicobject/Foo.tmp': No such file or directory

The solution for me was to:

1. checkout the directory on a case-sensitive filesystem (ie. a linux machine)
2. delete one of the offending files
3. commit the delete

Bonus Material: how did I get myself in this situation?
I renamed a file from OpenFileInIntelliJ.java to OpenFileInIntellij.java. Subversion cannot actually rename a file. Instead, it fakes it by creating a copy and then deleting the original. As you can imagine, this doesn't work too well on a case-insensitive file system...

# posted by Jesse Wilson on Sunday, April 15, 2007