One of the fundamental rules of Subversion is that a “push” action does not cause a “pull,” nor the other way around. Just because you're ready to submit new changes to the repository doesn't mean you're ready to receive changes from other people. And if you have new changes still in progress, then svn update should gracefully merge repository changes into your own, rather than forcing you to publish them.

The main side effect of this rule is that it means a working copy has to do extra bookkeeping to track mixed revisions as well as be tolerant of the mixture. It's made more complicated by the fact that directories themselves are versioned.

For example, suppose you have a working copy entirely at revision 10. You edit the file foo.html and then perform an svn commit, which creates revision 15 in the repository. After the commit succeeds, many new users would expect the working copy to be entirely at revision 15, but that's not the case! Any number of changes might have happened in the repository between revisions 10 and 15. The client knows nothing of those changes in the repository, since you haven't yet run svn update, and svn commit doesn't pull down new changes. If, on the other hand, svn commit were to automatically download the newest changes, then it would be possible to set the entire working copy to revision 15—but then we'd be breaking the fundamental rule of “push” and “pull” remaining separate actions. Therefore, the only safe thing the Subversion client can do is mark the one file—foo.html—as being at revision 15. The rest of the working copy remains at revision 10. Only by running svn update can the latest changes be downloaded and the whole working copy be marked as revision 15.