Tilded Target Folder

I think I finally grokked the following unexpected interaction between svn and Maven/Eclipse Workspace Resolution feature. First, a bash illustration:

bash-3.2$ svn stat
?       .classpath
?       .project
?       .settings
~       target

See the "~       target"? That is what I believe was the cause of a mysterious build problem. (The tilde is probably due to me changing from "svn:ignore *" inside target dir, to "svn:ignore target", after discovering that the former doesn't work well. Maybe more in other blog post.)

The symptom of the problem I've been having for a few hours can be demonstrated and summarized like this: 

No problem building in maven. 

Lots of errors in red in Eclipse, as if a Maven dependency is not resolved somehow. 

Turning off Workspace Resolution makes the errors go away. 

Conclusion: something is up with Workspace Resolution. 

Theory: 1) there is something wrong with the target directory; 2) workspace resolution uses a project's target directory for dependencies (perhaps just points to $dependee_project/target/classes on the classpath). 

But that seems crazy. Surely the build should care how SVN flags the target directory? But the coincidence is a bit too strong to ignore. 

--

Turns out that Eclipse clean + build fixed it. Don't know why.

But the target folder had a severe SVN weirdness...


Doing "svn update target" failed bizarrely: "svn: Unable to lock 'src'". Huh?

Finally it got unstuck, inside Eclipse: 

    E   .../target

    Updated to revision 23696.

    ===== File Statistics: =====

    Existing: 1

I've never seen this 'E', existing, before. I must've managed to set a svn:ignore on it, but it existed in the repo. Or something.