I know that lots of people have talked about vendor branches on lots of
different blogs and web sites but I've never seen a complete answer to the
question I want to ask here.
My situation looks something like this:
upstream repo
trunk
tags
release-1.0
release-1.1
release-1.2
...
branches
release-1.0
release-1.1
release-1.2
...
local repo (trunk a copy of upstream via svn_load_dirs)
trunk
tags
branches
release-5.6
release-5.7
...
In the past, we have updated our local trunk from the upstream trunk via
svn_load_dirs/svnmerge. This works ok. Not great by any means (we lose
history from upstream) but it's at least functional.
The problem really gets tricky when you start looking at merging from
upstream *branches.* In that case, what's in the branch/tag is something that
appears nowhere on the upstream trunk. At some point it was branched from
trunk and stuff was cherry-picked into it from trunk as bugs were fixed for
release. So one can't just do an svn_load_dirs from trunk at the point of the
branch/tag. And one can't svn_load_dirs from a release branch and then
svn_load_dirs from trunk later because svn_load_dirs by its very nature
aggregates lots of individual revisions into one giant one. There's no way to
do the merge without a horrible number of conflicts, most of which are
spurious.
We really do need to merge from a release branch into our local repository
and in the future do merges from later release branches or from trunk.
Now, one way to do this is to create a setup like this:
local repo (trunk a copy of upstream via svn_load_dirs)
trunk
tags
branches
release-5.6
release-5.7
upstream
current
trunk
tags
branches
and do svn_load_dirs into upstream/current from whatever we want to merge in
(upstream release/tag branches, trunk, etc.). Then depending on what we
loaded into current, we could branch it to upstream/trunk
upstream/tags/release-x.y and so on. We would then svnmerge from
upstream/current to our trunk.
This would work, I think, though we'd lose a lot of history and revision
granularity due to the way svn_load_dirs works.
I don't know how people handle this kind of need with svn. Does anyone have
a solution? I've been looking at Piston a bit. Does anyone have experience
with it and know whether it could help with this?
Thanks for your help!
-Dave
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Received on 2008-06-12 23:26:16 CEST