Re: svn merge --record-only, svn merges - how to use - quick question

On Mon, Apr 22, 2013 at 5:15 AM, Z W <mpc8250_at_gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi All
>
> How does one use --record-only option with svn merge ?

It is used to tell svn that a revision has already been merged. A
typical use case is when you want to "block" a certain revision from
being merged.

See http://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.7/svn.branchmerge.advanced.html#svn.branchmerge.advanced.blockchanges

> Is it used when a revision number is found in svn mergeinfo eligible list
> and returns no changes ?
> ie
> eg r234455 is on the eligible list but when applied with svn merge, there's
> no change.
> Is that when we use --record-only option after that ?

Perhaps. But you don't really need to use --record-only in that case.
I'd say: just run the merge as you just did (because it's in the
eligible list): even though it didn't perform any content changes to
the files, it might have rearranged the mergeinfo for you (elided).
After that, there's really no need to "record-only" it anymore ... it
will already be recorded (and will no longer show up in the eligible
list).

> Will it mess up the --bidirectional option when applying the merge from
> branch to a trunk in the future ?

What's the --bidirectional option?

Do you mean the "automatic merging" (aka Symmetric merge [1]) that's
slated for release in SVN 1.8?

AFAIK, using --record-only by itself won't harm "automatic merging" in
any way (it just does what it always did: recording a revision as
having been merged).

Though subtree merging can make things considerably more difficult.
See for instance:
  http://subversion.tigris.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=4269 (subtree
mergeinfo can degrade automatic merge performance)

> Would it cause any harm if we remerge the same files even though there's no
> changes to the destination files and the original files ?

No (unless you interfere manually with merge tracking, e.g. by not
committing some mergeinfo change or something). Some mergeinfo might
be elided, but other than that ...

> Why does the merge below returns empty ?
> [linux svn 1.6 workingCopyDir] svn merge -c 234455
> [url]https://some.url.com/svn/code/path[/url]
> [linux svn 1.6 workingCopyDir]

Not sure what you mean here. If the merge doesn't have anything to do,
there will be no output I guess.

> When we did this below, it also returns empty. Why is that ?
> [linux svn 1.6 workingCopyDir] svn prophet svn:mergeinfo .
> [linux svn 1.6 workingCopyDir]

I suppose you mean "propget". If the property is not set, it will not
return anything.

[1] http://wiki.apache.org/subversion/SymmetricMerge

--
Johan