svn mv works for me:
C:\svn\co>svn mv my_dir new_dir
A new_dir
D my_dir\New Text Document.txt
D my_dir
C:\svn\co>svn commit -m foo
Raderar my_dir
Lägger till new_dir
Arkiverade revision 2.
C:\svn\co>
Sorry for the Swedish output of svn.
There must be something else that is wrong in your case.
Edit:
As pointed out in the comments by Lloeki
To reproduce the behavior you also need to update and commit a file contained in the folder, but not update the folder itself.
file commit creates a new rev n on the
repo, but local metadata is not
updated (as it has always be, see svn
log after any commit) , thus dir
metadata is at rev n-1. It follows
that svn won’t commit because of the
metadata diff, and it won’t update
because there’s indeed a conflict on
the dir: update metadata vs delete.
The behavior is “expected” and the “solution” is to update the working copy before issuing the svn rename command.