question on svn merge without revision numbers

Dear Experts,

Almost all the documentation I've seen on svn merge suggests using a
revision number for things to merge. Is this really necessary?

Let's say I create a branch called foo and work on it for a while. Then I
want to merge it back into the trunk. Can I just do

svn merge <URL-for-branch> <URL-for-trunk> <URL-for-trunk>

to merge it back into the trunk? Similarly, if I want to merge the trunk
into the branch, can I just do

 svn merge <URL-for-trunk> <URL-for-branch> <URL-for-branch>

From my reading of the svn documentation, it seems like svn merge A B C
should compare A and B and apply the changes to C so this should work.

What are the issues that make the svn documentation focus so heavily on
doing merges by revision number? If your branch has 20 revisions, doesn't it
get painful to have to do a separate merge command for each revision?

Thanks,
-Emin
Received on Sat Jul 21 00:02:33 2007