RE: SVN Copy

Hi Michael

Thanks for the reply. You suggest to go for Merge instead of Copy?
Currently our SVN server is 1.4.6, we cannot implement Merge here. We
are in the process of upgrading the server. Any other alternative
solution for a temporary fix.

Regards

Vishwanath

From: Michael P. Reilly [mailto:arcege_at_gmail.com]
Sent: Monday, March 08, 2010 7:50 PM
To: Ramachandran, Vishwanath(IE10)
Cc: users_at_subversion.apache.org
Subject: Re: SVN Copy

On Mon, Mar 8, 2010 at 9:04 AM, Ramachandran, Vishwanath(IE10)
<Vishwanath.Ramachandran_at_honeywell.com> wrote:

Hi there

In a subversion working copy(XYZ), we are doing development in different
branches. So the TRUNK contains the code base that is released to
market.

There are different branches which are having different version of XYZ
source.

Currently we want to merge XYZ 1.2 version of branch to TRUNK.

So instead of merge, we thought of doing COPY, because merge will take
lot of efforts here because the trunk and the branch are different
versions altogether.

So for COPY, we are planning to do the following steps.

1) Move the TRUNK to a TAG using the SVN MOVE command.

(2) Copy the XYZ_1.2.0_BUILD24_RELEASE_RC1 TAG to the TRUNK.

No need to do an explicit delete/commit on the trunk because svn move
does a svn copy + svn delete and requires an immediate commit.

Please review the steps and let us know, if its fine in terms of
retaining SVN history etc....

Regards

Vishwanath

You will not retain the history on the trunk. The history breaks at the
point that you issue the move command. There is a reason why there is a
'merge' and there are 'move/copy/delete'. They are very different and
each is very necessary in its own way.

My first reaction to what you are trying to do is EWWWWW. You're
creating a huge mess when you want to go back and look at the revision
history of your code. You'll have to try to keep track of cross links
between branches- why does the history of the trunk suddenly stop at
revision X and switch to branch A? Why does the history of branch A
suddenly switch to the trunk? Why can't I look at the history of the
trunk older than six months ago (assume branch A is five months old)?
How do I get that history back?

My suggestion to you is to clone the repository and try it out. Then
see the ramifications - you will probably not be happy. I will be much
easier on you later on to deal with the merge than to try to defeat the
software and create problems.
 
  -Arcege

-- 
There's so many different worlds,
So many different suns.
And we have just one world,
But we live in different ones.