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

On Thu, Apr 3, 2008 at 6:18 PM, Hari Kodungallur <hkodungallur_at_gmail.com>
wrote:

> I agree as well that the direction should be made explicit in the help. I
> never noticed it till now :-)
>
> Nathan, I tend to look at it this way:
>
> svn merge [from] [to] [dest]
> - difference from [from] to [to] and merge it to the [dest] which is the
> working copy
>
> If you meant [src] and [dest] in terms of the diff direction, I think you
> have it backwards. Or may be I am confused!!
>

hmm; well i think it has the same semantics as svn diff; heres a snippet
from the output of

svn help diff

3. diff OLD-URL[@OLDREV] NEW-URL[@NEWREV]

i believe svn merge behaves the same way, right? like, the first thing it
does is, svn diff, then it applies those differences to the working copy
thats been specified.

so for example if you had a branch, branchB, and a trunk say; and you did
something like

svn merge branchB trunk wc

that would be treating the branch as 'older', which could make sense if you
merged onto trunk from branchA and then wanted to merge down to branchB.
but if you branched, branchB, off of trunk, did a bunch of work there and
wanted to get those changes back into trunk; it would be something like

svn merge trunk branchB wc

where wc would be a working copy of the trunk. not accounting for the
branch point of branchB, which i would do by using

svn log --stop-on-copy branchB

to determine the branch revision and then incorporate it into the above
merge command via the -r argument.

-nathan
Received on 2008-04-04 18:54:30 CEST