My company's svn repo has a lot of MS Word docs in it. We've implemented a policy that all .doc files must have the svn:needs-lock property set to prevent parallel access on files that are hard to merge (we've also done this for xls, ppt, pdf etc.).

We've implemented the policy by distributing a svn config with auto-props set appropriately for all relevant document types. We've also set up a pre-commit hook that checks that all added files of these types have the needs-lock property set (i.e. if they forget/are too lazy to update their svn config file, they won't be able to add any docs to the repo).

The problem I'm having, however, is that the pre-commit hook fails when users try to import files into the repo, e.g. some users like to add files directly thru TortoiseSVN's Repo Browser, which effectively is an svn import.

Through testing on other file types, I have seen that doing an import does in fact apply the auto-props listed in my config, but they don't seem to be applied at the point that the pre-commit hook runs. When importing .doc files, the hook fails, saying that the needs-lock property is missing.

Is there really much difference between adding a single file to a working copy and committing it vs importing a file directly? Do we need to tailor our precommit hook in some way to cater for this scenario?