Re: Is svn branching too difficult?

On Tue, May 18, 2010 at 9:55 AM, David Aldrich <David.Aldrich_at_eu.nec.com> wrote:

> I have just finished working on a branch and have performed a reintegrate merge back into the trunk. I only worked on 4 files in the branch and I carefully merged from trunk to branch several times (including immediately prior to the reintegration).
>
> The reintegration correctly identified the four files that I had worked on and that had changed, but also showed 101 files as
> 'Modified (properties only)'. I know that there are good documents that describe merging and explain what this sort of state
> means, but I struggle to understand what is going on during merging sometimes.

Subversion is likely working properly, but yes it is confusing. When
you do a merge into a branch, Subversion updates its mergeinfo
tracking on all of the locations that have the property set. There
have been numerous posts that describe how and why it gets set in the
first place.

Because it is confusing, we have changed how Subversion works in the
next release. It will not update paths that were not modified by the
merge, and then Subversion was modified to handle the fact that these
paths do not get their merge tracking information updated.

Note that if you ran SVN diff and looked at the output you would see
that Subversion updated its merge tracking on these paths. Overall,
it is still likely confusing as to why, but I think it would be
relatively clear what it did.

-- 
Thanks
Mark Phippard
http://markphip.blogspot.com/