Over the past year, there have been several discussions regarding
undesirable side-effects of the currently (too) "permissive" merge mode on
this list. As of today, subversion will silently discard changes (instead
of signaling a conflict) under certain merging scenarios.
One such problem is out-of-order merging of repeated added & deleted
changes, where changes can easily be lost on the target branch despite
svn:mergeinfo claiming that everything has been merged [1].
At my employer, we have a post-commit code review & approval scheme. Under
this scheme, developers are free to commit to trunk. Afterwards, all
changesets are reviewed and approved before being merged to a release
branch containing only "approved" changes. This scheme results in a lot of
out-of-order merging, since the time delay for code review and approval
varies a lot. We have therefore encountered issue #4405 [1] several times
the last year. I find this loss of changes rather worrying, since it
happens silently without any conflict or error message. It is therefore
very difficult for end users to identify this "data loss".
The previously proposed solution for this problem has been to add a new
"strict conflicts" merge mode. I very much like this idea, and would like
it to get increased attention if possible.
Could if be possible to add "strict conflicts" to the most wanted list on
the Subversion roadmap webpage?
Thanks in advance,
Fredrik Orderud
[1] http://subversion.tigris.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=4405
Received on 2013-11-17 23:51:58 CET