Update the working copy

While you are working on a project, other members of your team may be committing changes to the project repository. To get these changes, you have to update your working copy. Updating may be done on single files, a set of selected files, or recursively on entire directory hierarchies The update operation can be performed either from Working Copy view or Synchronize view. The Update action in the Working Copy view is different from the Update action in the Synchronize view. The Update action from the Working Copy view updates the selected resources to the HEAD revision on the repository. The Synchronize view action updates the selected resources to the revision against which the Synchronize operation was performed.

There are three different kinds of incoming changes:

  • Non-conflicting - A non-conflicting change occurs when a file has been changed remotely but has not been modified locally.

  • Conflicting, but auto-mergeable - An auto-mergeable conflicting change occurs when a text file has been changed both remotely and locally (i.e. has non-committed local changes) but the changes are on different lines.

  • Conflicting - A conflicting change occurs when one or more of the same lines of a text file have been changed both remotely and locally. Binary files are never auto-mergeable and are conflicting by default.

If the resource contains only incoming changes or the outgoing changes do not intersect with incoming ones then the update will end normally, the Subversion system merging incoming changes into the local file. In the case of conflicting situation the update will have as result a file with conflict status.

The Syncro SVN Client allows you to update your working copy files to a specific revision, not only the most recent one. This can be done by using Update to revision action from the History view contextual menu.

If you select multiple files and folders and then you perform an Update, all of those files/folders are updated one by one. The Subversion client makes sure that all files/folders belonging to the same repository are updated to the exact same revision, even if between those updates another commit occurred.

When the update fails with a message saying that there is already a local file with the same name Subversion tried to checkout a newly versioned file, and found that an unversioned file with the same name already existed in your working folder. Subversion will never overwrite an unversioned file unless you specifically do this with Override and update. If you get this error message, the solution is simply to rename the local unversioned file. After completing the update, you can check whether the renamed file is still needed.