Copy, Commit, Copy followed by Merge

My apologies if this is a common issue, but my reading the book and scanning the previous posts didn't answer my question.

We switched from SourceUnsafe to Subversion a week ago. Recently and engineer was trying to merge a branch that he had created, but in a little bit of a weird way. The results were not intuitive...

Here is the sequence (although names have been changed, and the syntax is more for understanding than correctness):

svn copy dir_A his_branch
svn copy dir_B his_branch
svn commit his_branch
[Revision X]

<work on his_branch>

svn copy file_C his_branch
svn commit his_branch
[Revision Y]

<more work on his_branch>

svn merge -rX:HEAD his_branch trunk

The issue is that file_C shows as conflicted, with the one file being empty (r0). It appears that the merge operation doesn't track the parentage of file_C because it wasn't part of the commit that created the branch (rX).

Is this correct behavior or a bug?

Thanks,
Bryant Eastham
Chief Architect
Matsushita Electric Works R&D Laboratory
Salt Lake City Lab
4525 South Wasatch Blvd., Suite 100, Salt Lake City, Utah 84124
Phone : 801.993.7124 Email: beastham@slc.mew.com
Fax: 801.993.7460 Web: http://slc.mew.com
Received on Thu Jun 9 16:51:36 2005