Re: spurious mergeinfo property created on copy?

On Tue, 09 Oct 2007, Ben Collins-Sussman wrote:

> I asked about this behavior in IRC, and no-one's quite sure if this is
> a bug or not:
>
> $ svn cp README README2
> A README2
>
> $ svn pl -v README2
> Properties on 'README2':
> svn:keywords : LastChangedDate
> svn:mergeinfo :
> svn:eol-style : native
>
>
> Notice that the copy created an (empty) svn:mergeinfo property. Is
> this expected?

Yes, this is expected when not using the '-g' option, since we can't
calculate the correct mergeinfo for the copied path without being able
to contact the repository. Instead, we're dropping all mergeinfo for
the path.

We've discussed a couple times using copyfrom history at mergeinfo
usage time (as Mike just mentioned again in issue #2875), rather than
making the implied mergeinfo for copied paths explicit at copy/move
time.

This would -- potentially significantly -- increase the penalty for
mergeinfo calculation, but would also elegantly solve some of our
oustanding problems, including:

* Producing merge history for existing repositories for copied/moved paths

* WC -> WC copy/move operations need to contact the repository