I recently created some new binary files. I happened to pick a name for these that ended in ".data", thinking that would remind me and others in the future that this was just data.
Because I'm an Apache committer, I had followed the svn config setup in http://apache.org/dev/svn-eol-style.txt. I had done this many years ago :-). When I tried to commit the new data files to SVN, I got this error message: add -N C:\xxxx....\xxx.data Illegal target for the requested operation svn: File 'C:\xxxx....\xxx.data' has binary mime type property I'm sorry to say this message wasn't very helpful. I knew the file was "binary". I've added binary files before to SVN. This message gave no reason why the file was "illegal". The answer turned out to be in that Apache standard configuration file for SVN - it specified that files ending with ".data" should have the svn property svn:eol-style=native. A wonderful error message would have been something like the following: Illegal target for the requested operation because the target file is a binary file, and that is conflicting with the svn property eol-style=native, which is automatically being added because the file type is matching a rule for this in the svn configuration file, located here: xxxx; fix this by any of the following actions: change the file type to something that doesn't match a rule in the configuration file that is adding the conflicting property, or change the configuration file rules to not add the conflicting property. I'm not subscribed to the list, so if you wish, please cc: me on any replies. -Marshall Schor
