Re: Core dump while merging on 0.14.2

Philip Martin <philip@codematters.co.uk> writes:

> As far as I can see, although merge accepts working copy "source"
> arguments, it appears to use them only for obtaining the source URLs.
> Thus merge ignores any local changes in the working copy sources. Is
> this how merge is supposed to work? It surprised me.

Merge was written to use the *exact* same code-path as

       svn diff URL1 URL2
     
...the only difference being that it applies the diffs to working
files as local mods, instead of dumping them to the terminal.

So the fact that 'svn merge' can accept working-paths as source inputs
is a bit misleading; that's purely a *convenience* for not having to
type two full URLs to compare.

I don't think anyone has yet attempted to pass an unversioned (or in
this case, a scheduled-for-addition) working-path as a merge
source... until now. I'm surprised it took this long for this
misunderstanding to happen. :-)

There are two choices here:

1. change docs whereever appropriate to clarify the situation; that
   is, we need to stress that 'svn merge' compares two URLs, not any
   two arbitrary paths.

2. make 'svn merge' more complex, so that it can use not just the
   libsvn_client diff editor (which is URL to URL comparison), but the
   libsvn_wc diff editor (which is URL to WC comparison.) I think
   it's doable, but it may prove to be quite a biggish project.

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Received on Mon Aug 26 17:23:51 2002