Does SVN 1.4.x not know about "ancestry"?

I am forced to work with a SVN version on our server that is quite old,
approximately 1.4.x. I use the latest Subversive version, but with the
connector version that works with 1.4.x on the server. This combination
works, but I'd like to understand some of the details underlying this.

I believe that one of the main features that is absent in 1.4.x with
respect to the latest is "ancestry", or "merge history". Is that
correct? So in either the SVN or Subversive documentation, any option
or feature related to "ancestry" will not be applicable here?

In the "red" book on Subversion, in the section on "svn merge", there is
the following statement:

"Unlike svn diff, the merge command takes the ancestry of a file into
consideration when performing a merge operation. This is very important
when you're merging changes from one branch into another and you've
renamed a file on one branch but not the other."

This is interesting, but nothing else is said about this. What exactly
does this imply?
Received on 2010-05-17 20:34:38 CEST