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Merging: Noisy branch commits and missing mergeinfo

From: Shaun Pinney <shaun.pinney_at_bil.konicaminolta.us>
Date: Wed, 29 Sep 2010 14:33:59 -0700

Hello all,

We've found that committing a branch after a merge shows many files
modified, even if they were not changed on the trunk. We'd like a
way to reduce the noise. Also, we've like a way to ensure merge
info is not accidentally omitted by the user. I'll give the back-
ground below:

A while back we had no branches and did all dev on the trunk.
Occasionally, some files needed to be merged to one another on the
trunk. For this, we used the merge operation so we could track the
sources of our merges - the alternative being no merge info at all.
Now, we've created a branch off the trunk and every time we merge
from trunk to branch there are many files whose only change is to
the svn:mergeinfo property.

For developers who need to inspect each change before commit, it
would be great to be able to ignore the files which only have
svn:mergeinfo changes. However, existing tools do not appear to
have this feature. TortoiseSVN's commit dialog allows users to
sort by 'Text status', to focus on textual changes. But if non-
mergeinfo properties were changed by the merge there is no such
filtering provided to separate 'manual' property edits from
'automatic' property edits such as svn:mergeinfo. Also, AFAIK
for Subclipse there is no way to filter based on textual changes
or to ignore svn:mergeinfo changes. Is there a feature available,
or can a feature be added to ease this?

Before asking for changes from the other SVN client developers I
wanted to suggest here that data automatically updated by SVN
(currently, merge information) could perhaps be stored in another
manner, rather than as an SVN property.

Another issue we've found with merging is that users can merge
from trunk to a top-level branch directory, yet the user need
not commit at the top-level branch directory - possibly leaving
out mergeinfo needed by graphing tools such as the Subclipse
Revision Graph. I'm think providing users with a means to omit
merge info is not a benefit. Is there a way to force all mergeinfo
generated by a merge operation to be committed? While we can put
a merge+commit policy in place it seems like the tool should have
a method to ensure merge info is not omitted. Thanks in advance
for all your ideas and feedback.

Best,
Shaun
Received on 2010-09-29 23:43:45 CEST

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