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Re: mergeinfo properties getting carried around, makes for confusing merges

From: Stefan Sperling <stsp_at_elego.de>
Date: Tue, 10 Nov 2009 13:20:02 +0100

On Tue, Nov 10, 2009 at 12:52:06PM +0100, Stein Somers wrote:
> Pat Farrell wrote:
> > But, svn propdel svn:mergeinfo -R fails
> > svn: Attempting to delete nonexistent property 'svn:mergeinfo'
>
> That's a good sign: there is no mergeinfo on the target folder or any of
> its children anymore. Just commit and your merge issues should be over
> and never return.
>
> Do note that you don't want to delete svn:mergeinfo on the working copy
> top folder, which seem to be /bbook/branches/pat or /bbook/trunk/trunk
> in your case.

When advising people to delete mergeinfo, it should be mentioned that
blindly deleting mergeinfo can cause problems. E.g. catch-up merges
might suddenly try to merge things again which were already merged.

When deleting mergeinfo from subtrees, you should examine what you
are deleting. Make sure that it is really redundant information by
comparing it to mergeinfo recorded in the parents.

If the mergeinfo is not redundant, it is there for a reason.
Either a bug in Subversion (if you were using early 1.5.x versions),
or because of the way certain merges were done (more likely unless
all your users are among the few who understand Subversion's merge
tracking feature extremely well and always follow best practices;
reading http://www.collab.net/community/subversion/articles/merge-info.html
is a good first step to become one of those people).

Looking at the log history should provide enough information
about the merges people have done, and whether the way the merge was
done really makes sense (and follows best practices), and whether the
mergeinfo recorded with the merge really makes sense (if there already
is lots of subtree mergeinfo, people might fail to commit all mergeinfo
touched by merges they are doing, causing inconsistencies all over the
place).

It's often tedious to clean all of it up properly, so I guess many
will simply opt for the big hammer and remove all of it.
But if you do this, you should recognize that you are running a high
risk of removing valid mergeinfo from the HEAD revision.

Stefan

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Received on 2009-11-10 13:21:19 CET

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