Permissions Problems with SVN on OSX (10.5.7 Leopard)

I have no idea what I'm doing on Linux, at least not really, and even less on OSX. Two commands help me get over permissions problems whenever they arise. Here they are, in context, below (chflags and chmod):

root@Dans-13:/dans-data/php/the-project$svn switch http://svn.corp.my-client.com/my-client-external/the-project/trunk .
svn: Working copy '.' locked
svn: run 'svn cleanup' to remove locks (type 'svn help cleanup' for details)
root@Dans-13:/dans-data/php/the-project$svn cleanup
svn: In directory '.'
svn: Can't move source to dest
svn: Can't move '.svn/tmp/dir-props' to '.svn/dir-props': Operation not permitted
root@Dans-13:/dans-data/php/the-project$chmod -R 777 .
chmod: ./.svn/all-wcprops: Operation not permitted
chmod: ./.svn/dir-props: Operation not permitted
chmod: ./.svn/entries: Operation not permitted
chmod: ./.svn/format: Operation not permitted
root@Dans-13:/dans-data/php/the-project$chflags -R nouchg .
root@Dans-13:/dans-data/php/the-project$chmod -R 777 .
root@Dans-13:/dans-data/php/the-project$svn cleanup
root@Dans-13:/dans-data/php/the-project$

Now the switch goes without a hitch!