Question about Branching/Merging practices

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Hi there,

I have a problem with a specific "use case" of subversion, considering
branching and merging. Of course I read the svn book, and for most
"simpler" cases, branching and merging works like a charm (for years,
that is).

But in my current working environment with more than 10 developers
working in different groups, I ran into this problem:

1. we reach a point where we need to branch from trunk for a second
dev team for a "special enhancement" which will most likely break the
system for some weeks/month (i.e. major redesign). Lets say we branch
in r100, work begins, and the branch develops to r110.

2. while those 2nd branch is "in the works", there where some bugfixes
that had to be applied to the trunk (critical stuff). Those have been
commited in r106.

3. we decide that we need those bugfixes *immediatly* in the branch,
because they affect work on the redesign badly as well, so we do a
merge:
branch_wd:> svn merge -r100:110 svn://trunk
....

branch_wd:> svn commit
commited as r111

4. so far so good. The branch continues, and we finally reach
completion on r140.

5. now we want to merge all changes from the branch back to trunk:

trunk_wd:> svn merge -r100:140 svn://branch

Wupps: this will lead to some conflicts, because we will actually
re-"merge" the changes we merged from trunk to the branch in r111 into
the trunk!

But what can be done to avoid this? Is there a possibility to somehow
make svn "ignore" changes that have been commited?

Should we do two merges, like:

svn merge -r100:110 svn://branch
svn merge -r111:140 svn://branch

which would obviously ignore the merged changes from trunk, but leads
to a LOT of work if more than one time in history changes have been
merged from trunk to the branch? Or is this use of svn merge simply
wrong, and the whole scenario should be handled differently in the
first place?

With best regards,
   Lars

- --
Lars Grunewaldt - Dipl. Inf. (FH)
* software development
* multimedia design
skills: C/C++/Java/Python/PHP/(X)HTML/Flash/audio/video
web: http://www.dark-reality.de
mail: lgw_at_dark-reality.de

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.7 (Darwin)

iD8DBQFH2QmpISCS20rPIYsRApbsAJwL076UsiWryXYvFbuwzgSvpphgCwCfUa4n
TtJ+DwkmFxbc/3oVWJ47wHo=
=bd9t
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: users-unsubscribe_at_subversion.tigris.org
For additional commands, e-mail: users-help_at_subversion.tigris.org
Received on 2008-03-13 13:36:07 CET