improving the "svn help merge" text....

Does anyone else but me find the help provided with "svn help merge"
to be missing a vital piece of information? Or at least that it's
non-obvious?

Here's the first explanation, the others are similar:

merge: Apply the differences between two sources to a working copy path.
  1. merge sourceURL1[@N] sourceURL2[@M] [WCPATH]

  1. In the first form, the source URLs are specified at revisions
     N and M. These are the two sources to be compared. The revisions
     default to HEAD if omitted.

Differences between two files have a *direction*, which isn't
indicated here. The set of differences that turn oldfile into newfile
are *different* from the set that turn newfile back into oldfile. The
diff man page (at least on GNU/Linux) catches this:

SYNOPSIS
        diff [options] from-file to-file

Compare that to the merge command (on FreeBSD; I believe it's from the
GNU reimplementation of rcs) states the direction of the diff that's
going to generate the merges very clearly:

    merge [ options ] file1 file2 file3
    merge incorporates all changes that lead from file2 to file3 into file1.

Perforces integrate help text is somewhat obfuscated, but the
direction for the diff is still clear.

    p4 integrate [ options ] fromFile[revRange] toFile
    'p4 integrate' stages change propagation from source files to target
    files,

The subversion version (quoted above) doesn't state which direction
the differences that are going to be applied go. Yes, the numbers 1
and 2 give the right order, and the command line order is the same for
them all. However, it'd be nice if the help text made this explicit.

     Thanks,
     <mike

-- 
Mike Meyer <mwm@mired.org>		http://www.mired.org/consulting.html
Independent Network/Unix/Perforce consultant, email for more information.
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