Interesting svn Recovery Problem

I was just trying to recover some files from a subversion repository at work that were deleted a few revisions ago. Here's what happened:

update to old revision where directory jlamothe still exists:

$ svn -r 2444 up -q

directory jlamothe is there in revision 2444:

$ ls
cjm  david  jlamothe  pix  wgm

updated to HEAD, jlamothe got deleted in HEAD:

$ svn up
D    jlamothe
Updated to revision 2477.

see, it is gone:

$ ls
cjm  david  pix  wgm

trying to recover:

$ svn cp -r 2444 svn+ssh://david@weatherwax/svn/repos/Docs/jlamothe . -q
svn: The URL 'svn+ssh://david@weatherwax/svn/repos/Docs/jlamothe' has a different repository root than its parent

it's there:

$ ls
Bryght  D-Wave  acheron  cjm  david  jlamothe  pix  wgm

but it wasn't scheduled for addition? although the files beneath it were.

$ svn st
?      jlamothe
M      david/decomposition.tex

This had me stumped for a long time. It turns out it was the "svn: The URL 'svn+ssh://david@weatherwax/svn/repos/Docs/jlamothe' has a different repository root than its parent" that was the problem. For some reason because I used a slightly different URL (although equivalent, thanks to my /etc/hosts file) it didn't schedule it, as if it wasn't even part of this working directory...as if I had created a new working directory within another working directory.