Re: Merging and history logs

Robert Dailey wrote:
> Hi everyone,
>
> I'm posting this to both the TortoiseSVN developer's mailing list as
> well as the Subversion users mailing list because I feel this topic is
> important enough that both communities may wish to express their
> opinions on the matter.
>
> To best explain what I have in mind, first let me begin with a
> scenario. Suppose there is a project that is currently in production,
> who's source code is in a subversion repository at
> svn://myserver/repo/project/trunk. All developers working on the
> project mostly work directly from trunk. However, in the case where a
> specific programmer wants to work on a very heavy feature that will
> take a week to complete, he/she makes a branch at
> svn://myserver/repo/project/branches/branch1. During the existence of
> 'branch1', several commits are made. For the purposes of this example,
> let's say there's a hefty list of 200 commits, each with a very
> extensive commit log explaining the purpose for each commit along with
> very explicit details on the changes included in the commit (bug
> fixes, features, refactoring, etc). When the feature is complete, now
> the programmer wants to merge "branch1" back to trunk.
>
> After merging the 200 revisions in the branch back into trunk, the
> programmer is ready to commit those changes. However, the programmer
> is faced with a very difficult task: creating a log message for the
> commit that contains the local modifications that was in the "branch1"
> branch. Ideally, this would be the concatenated list of history logs
> of all the 200 revisions made in the feature branch. However, since
> there is nothing to automate this task, the programmer simply says
> "This commit implements feature X______X ".
>
> A month later, we have progressed much further into the project and
> during that time a cleanup phase of the repository has happened.
> Amongst other things, this cleanup phase includes going through the
> branches for the project and deleting the ones that are no longer
> being used, which were branches for features already implemented and
> merged over. After this cleanup phase has happened, I am curious to
> see what specific changes were made in that new feature that was
> merged in a month ago from "branch1". Well, my first and most typical
> attempt at this is to "show log" on trunk. Well, this really doesn't
> give me much, as I simply see the arbitrary log message that the
> programmer merging in that feature provided that does not explain the
> details of the merge. As a second attempt, I look in the specific

If your server is 1.5.x, it can (and will):
enable the checkbox "include merged revisions", and the log dialog will
then show you all the merged revisions too.

> changes for that checkin, but I see nothing that tells me which
> location in the repository these files were merged from (As this would
> indeed be the case if there were no added or removed files, only
> modified). I would then, as a third attempt, have to contact the

You could use the revision graph: it will show you all the branches that
were created and even in which revision they got removed.

Stefan

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