Need some help with merging/vendor branches

I have a merge problem I'm stuck on. This stuff is really
complicated the first time through...

I set up this repository initially with the understanding that we
would not be merging in future versions of the software it was based
on, but that plan has changed. I'm relatively new to svn and so
going back and retrofitting the steps I should have done in the first
place has proved to be a "challenge", shall we say.

Here is what I have done so far, attempting to follow the steps in
the online book and map them to my situation:

First I created the initial vendor branch "current". I looked at the
history of the trunk and determined that r5 was the complete initial
version with no changes. So:

- made copy of repository, in case I need to go back
- checked out r5 from trunk into working copy rev-5
- svn import rev-5 file:///svnrepos/dodss/vendor/openacs/current -m
'importing first rev of DODSS files'
- svn copy file:///svnrepos/dodss/vendor/openacs/current file:///
svnrepos/dodss/vendor/openacs/initial-rev -m 'tagging initial rev'

Next I merged the latest version of openacs into "current"

- made another copy of repository
- downloaded openacs-5.4.2 tarball and uncompressed into openacs-5.4.2
- got svn_load_dirs.pl from http://svn.collab.net/repos/svn/trunk/
contrib/client-side/svn_load_dirs/svn_load_dirs.pl.in
-- changed my $svn = '@SVN_BINDIR@/svn'; to my $svn = '/usr/bin/svn';
- ./svn_load_dirs.pl -t openacs-5.4.2 file:///svnrepos/dodss/vendor/
openacs current openacs-5.4.2

Then I merged these into my working copy:

- made another copy of repository
- made copy of working copy
- cd to working copy
- svn merge file:///svnrepos/dodss/vendor/openacs/initial-rev file:///
svnrepos/dodss/vendor/openacs/current

This was clearly not right as all the files I've added to the trunk
have been deleted from my working copy. Looking over the steps I
think I understand the problem... because the trunk was not created
as a copy of current, as it is in the book, there's no connection
between the two and my changes weren't included when I ran
svn_load_dirs.pl.

My question, then, is what to do now? My guess is to delete the
current directory I created above and recreate it as a copy from the
trunk at the latest version, then re-run svn_load_dirs.pl to merge
openacs-5.4-2 into that. Then do the merge into my working copy from
initial-rev and current. Is that right?

And, oops... I just deleted the fubar'd working copy and recreated it
from my backup copy, but I bet I was supposed to revert all those
adds and deletes first. So now I need to fix that too. Can I just
run "svn revert" anyway? Or did they all go away with the old .svn
directories? I'm not sure where these things are stored.

Thanks in advance for any help!

janine

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Janine Sisk
President/CEO of furfly, LLC
503-693-6407