Re: Switching between branches: scaling issue

Folker Schamel wrote:

> When using a branch for developing a particular feature
> for some longer time, then typically there are much
> more changes merged from trunk to the branch from day
> to day than the work itself done on the branch.

I hate to sound like a broken record, but svk does this very well, in that the
local mirror of trunk can be easily merged with the local branch. Tthe merge
back to the trunk is only the changes between the tip of the branch and the tip
of the trunk (as it should be).

>
> Now when doing a merge from trunk to the branch,
> every merged file gets a new node in the svn repository,
> even if the file will be the same as in trunk, correct?

Yes, because the branch copy is now changed from being a copy of the original
trunk file (due to the merge). Subversion doesn't track merge history (except
as log entries), so there is no way that it can tell that it should just update
the pointer on the branch to point at the new version on trunk.

However, I could definitely see the utility of having a new subcommand

        svn update --freshen

which would replace the WC content of a file which was a copy with the newer
content of the copy source, but only if there were no other local changes. IOW,
if the branch node was only a pointer to some other node, --freshen would
repoint the branch node to the latest revision of the original node. No, I
don't know how to program this, and no I don't know how this would work with
renames of the source node.

John

-- 
John Peacock
Director of Information Research and Technology
Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group
4501 Forbes Boulevard
Suite H
Lanham, MD  20706
301-459-3366 x.5010
fax 301-429-5748
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