merging in changes from external -- supported? doesn't make any sense?

let's say i have my project:

/trunk

and an external:

/otherproject

and they both have myfile.php. if i perform this action, with 1.3.1:

cd trunk
svn merge -r5:10 ../otherproject/myfile.php

svn does not complain.

furthermore, if i use revisions that are out of bounds for my project, it
does not complain; if i use revisions that are out of bounds for the
external, it DOES complain. so i know that it is using the versions of the
external when calculating the diff.

question: is this directly supported by svn or is it just a fluke that it
works?

[a] if it is supported, what else is supported? can i do svn cp operations
from externals into my main repository and svn will remember the history of
the file as coming from the external?
[b] if it is not supported, is it strongly discouraged due to metadata in my
main repository becoming corrupt/meaningless, or is it safe enough, and
serves as a convenient replacement for doing diff and patch manually?

thanks so much for any feedback.

John

http://lyceum.ibiblio.org/
Received on Wed May 3 23:37:21 2006