Problem with merge and --reintegrate

In our project we are using branches for two things: releases and features.

When most features have been implemented for the next release we copy trunk to
a release branch where we keep fixing bugs and preparing it for release.
Bug fixes have been merged back intro trunk resulting in trunk having the
svn:mergeinfo property set to /branches/release:xxx-yyy. Some commits to the
release branch we would not like to merge back to trunk though since they are
very local and only apply to that release. We trick subversion to skip those
revisions using the --record-only flag to merge. Nothing is ever cherry picked
from trunk to the release branch.

o---o----------o---------o----------------o--> trunk
    | ^ ^
    | | |
    +---o---------o------------o----> release

With a feature branch, we copy the trunk to branches/feature. We regularly
merge changes from trunk into the feature branch and work on the feature at the
same time.

The problem occurred when trying to reintegrate the feature branch with trunk
using these commands:

  cd trunk
  svn merge --reintegrate path/to/feature/branch

With the 1.5.1 client I got the following error message:

  svn: Cannot reintegrate from '...' yet:
  Some revisions have been merged under it that have not been merged
  into the reintegration target; merge them first, then retry.

I am not sure why I get this message, but I suspect it is because of the
previous merges from release branches intro trunk.

So I tried with a 1.6 client. Then the merge seemed to work but the strange
thing (at least I thought) was that the command also wrote the svn:mergeinfo
property. Why does it do that? The documentation says the feature branch is
useless after a reintegration.

I also tried out this command:

  cd trunk
  svn merge --ignore-ancestry ._at_HEAD ../branches/feature/@HEAD .

I think this should do the same thing as the reintegrate thing. Am I right?
However this command also messed with the svn:mergeinfo property. I can't
understand why.

How should I do to properly merge my feature branch back into trunk?

I am not registered to the mailing list, so I would appreciate if you also
replied to me directly in addition to the mailing list.

-- 
Rickard Lindberg
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