Redundant mergeinfo changes on subtrees with specialized mergeinfo

Hi. I just want to discuss a use case which is occurring with us.
Suppose we have a project structure such as follows:

trunk
|- moduleA
|- moduleB

We create a branch by copying trunk to branches/mybranch. Merges can be
done for the top-level directory (from trunk to branches/mybranch), or
just for one module (from trunk/moduleA to branches/mybranch/moduleA).
Sometimes we may even perform a merge on a single file deep in some of
the modules.

After a few such merges, we have specialized mergeinfo in
branches/mybranch/moduleA (and in other places as well).

Now suppose we commit a file in trunk/moduleB/file. Now we merge this
commit into a branches/mybranch working copy. This not only changes the
file moduleB/file, but also changes the mergeinfo in all subtrees with
specialized mergeinfo (including moduleA).

Now, as far as I can tell, those changes in moduleB and other unchanged
files are redundant, since the revision being merged has no changes at
all to those subtrees. And why should I commit a file/directory
resulting of a merge, when I am sure it wasn't changed?
IMHO this confuses the user, makes it difficult spotting the real and
relevant changes in the list of changed files, and pollutes the logs
with irrelevant commits to those files.

We are using svn 1.5.0-rc4 and TortoiseSVN as client, if that matters.

Leonardo Fernandes

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Received on 2008-04-29 12:42:33 CEST