Recently we had a user in #svn who somehow managed to create a copy that could not be committed because of out-of-dateness errors.
I am not exactly sure what the real cause of the problem was. It could be worked around by using a URL as copy source. So it is likely that mixed-revisionnes somehow interfered the commit. It was pointed out that novice users may not realise that they might be copying mixed-revision trees if they run svn copy DIR1 DIR2 in their working copy. Of course, mixed-revisions are explained in chapter 2 of the book and should be considered basic knowledge. But because mixed-revisionness is hard to notice (nothing except 'svn info' shows it), users often simply forget about it. We added the --allow-mixed-revisions option to 'svn merge' in 1.7. Would it make sense to make 'svn copy' require this option if the copy source is a mixed-rev WC subtree, in 1.8? This would make sure that WC->{WC,URL} copies produce, by default, the same result as URL->URL copies (modulo local mods in the WC).