SVN confusion: "local add, incoming add upon merge" What do the words actually refer to?

Question

I'm pretty new to subversion and the docs just aren't making sense to me. I was wondering if someone could break down this error message (from svn st) into plain English, as well as the other one I get local delete, incoming delete upon merge.

To be precise about my question:

1. What does local add (or local delete) refer to?
2. What does incoming add (or incoming delete) refer to?

What's mystifying to me is that the branch has absolutely nothing to do with the files that receive these errors. In other words, it doesn't add or delete any of these files locally (what I presume local add/delete means). Besides, if I had deleted the file locally, why would that be in conflict with a deletion in the repo (incoming) anyway?

Background Information

How I got here: I merged trunk into my branch and am trying to commit to my branch.

P.S. I've (tried to) read Managing trunk and feature branches: local delete, incoming delete upon merge, but there's too much terminology. Other questions/answers I've read here on SO don't seem to apply or else are hard to understand.

Apelles

Duplicate of #3986004 – Animadvert

It's a similar topic, but not a duplicate: I'm asking about the meanings of the words, not how to resolve the issue – Apelles

Answer 1

Local Add or Local Delete refers to the addition or deletion in the SVN working copy. Incoming Add or Incoming Delete refers to the update from svn repository. For example, user-A and User-B has checked out from Branch1. User-A is working on the file abc.java. User-B has deleted the same file and committed his changes. So now in SVN repository the file abc.java is not present and user-A is still modifying and when he tries to commit, he will get an out of date error. When user-A tried to update his working copy Incoming Delete and conflict occurs in the working copy of User-A. Similar is the case with merging. You can resolve the conflict by svn resolve --accept=working PATH

Lipo

Thanks for your reply. I'm still not clear why a local delete would conflict with an incoming delete. If anything, your answer heightens the mystery. – Apelles

Local delete is "svn delete" not "del filename" or "rm filename". So with update in the above situation you must get a tree conflict. – Lipo