Branch/Tag quirk in Subversion

I wasted 15 minutes of my life today to find out that when creating a branch in Subversion, it will always create one and only one new directory.

I was attempting to help a colleague who was trying to create a branch from his working copy. Important note: the repository did not already have a branches folder, which we wanted to create.

I walked him through the steps, and when it came time to enter the new branch's URL, I had him enter something similar to //repositoryRoot/branches/myNewBranchName.

SVN returned a cryptic error message: Path not present. Well, yeah. You're supposed to create the path.

So, I tried creating the folders in the repository. Now, SVN says that the path already exists. ARGH! I know that. I just created them!

My colleague finally figured out that SVN needs to create exactly one directory when creating a branch. Going back to the repo, we kept only the branches folder, entered the path, and voila! It worked.

So, when creating a branch in Subversion, remember that it must create one and only one directory.