Change tracking

Hello,

We've been using subversion for quite a while now and have mostly
bneen very happy with it.

We have however started to have a bit of a problem with change
tracking. We develop projects on individual branches which are then
merged to a release branch for QA and testing. When the release is
rolled out it is merged to the trunk.

This all works fine: the problem is that we have one member of staff
who's responsibility is release management: this person does the
merges to the release branches and the merges to the trunk.

The upshot is that when doing svn blame on the trunk (or release)
branches it looks like all of the changes were made by this person,
and not the actual editor of the line. This obviously reduces the
usefulness of svn blame and other history exploration functions. It
makes it very hard to find the source of the code that is (for
example) causing a problem.

The ideal situation for me would be that Subversion would maintain the
association between author and the changed line. However, I suspect
that subversion doesn't work like that, and the association is between
the author and the changeset. This would mean that what we need is
impossible, since a merge from release to trunk would doubtless
involve lines authored by a mixture of authors.

Alternatively, if Subversion were capable of merge tracking, it could
potentially trace back the the original change before all of the
merges happened, which would solve the problem. However, I understand
that Subversion does not at present have this functionality.

Could anybody comment on the problem and potentially suggest a
workaround. Also, does anybody else have the same problem and consider
that a change to rectify would be a very nice to have in the future?
Are there any plans to make the system work more like this in the
future?

Thanks.

-- 
Russ
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