Re: Question about excessive mergeinfo

On Monday 11 January 2010, Stein Somers wrote:
> No explanation here, and not the same symptoms, but you're not the only
> one struggling with it. I have a pre-commit hook to detect mergeinfo
> below root, and remove it whenever it occurs, which is rare.

Doh. Wish I had had that idea earlier.

> When copying by URL a subdirectory from another branch to somewhere in a
> WC, the new subdirectory always gets a mergeinfo property. Its value is
> a copy of the mergeinfo of the root of the source branch (where this
> "root" is an interpretation of course; more accurately, it is the
> nearest (and only) higher directory that has a mergeinfo property,
> relative to the copied subdirectory).

Technically, a missing mergeinfo implicitly means that a dir or file has its
parent dir's mergeinfo. This is even documented. So, the source dir doesn't
actually get a new and different mergeinfo, it is only set on the dir
explicitly now while it was implicit before.

> Not surprisingly, the new mergeinfo is a subset of the mergeinfo of the
> current working copy root: fewer branches listed, fewer revisions listed.
> In my interpretation of the rules, this mergeinfo is entirely useless.
> So no thank you, I don't commit it.

I think SVN wants you to not copy the file/dir but instead to merge the
revision where it was added to the branch. Yes, a simple copy is easier to
explain in some cases, though it doesn't capture all possible changes in a
branch.

Cheers!

Uli

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