[Svnmerge] Log of merges

[Blair Zajac]

Archie Cobbs wrote:
> Giovanni Bajo wrote:
> 
>> I'll have to further investigate the needs of the maintainer. What I have
>> understood is that, using svnmerge, he looses what he considers a 
>> valuable
>> information, that is the multiple merge tags. With CVS, they were 
>> always around
>> for obvious reasons, and he often uses the last 3/4 merge tags for diff
>> operations and whatnot. I believe the typical questions are: "what was 
>> changed
>> in this file since last merge?", "if I rollback to immediately after last
>> merge, does this bug show up? What if I go back two merges? Or three?".
>>
>> With CVS, you could answer this with things liks "cvs
>> diff -rMYBRANCH_MERGE_20051022 foo.c", and "cvs up 
>> -rMYBRANCH_MERGE_20051014
>> foo.c". You can almost do the same if you use multiple merge tags with 
>> SVN (the
>> required command line is much longer, and this is being discussed 
>> right now in
>> the dev subversion mailing list). With svnmerge, one has to manually 
>> inspect
>> the full log of the branch to find the wanted revision numbers, and 
>> use those
>> numbers. This is much more burdesome, especially if compared to a "svn 
>> ls" to
>> get the merge tag names.
>>
>> This is why I was proposing "svnmerge log": we do the tedious work of 
>> finding
>> out the merges, and show those.
> 
> 
> I'm still skeptical :-)
> 
> With CVS, merge tags must be added manually. I.e., 
> "MYBRANCH_MERGE_20051022"
> didn't just appear magically, someone had to put it there.
> 
> So why can't the SVN equivalent ("svn cp") be done in the SVN case?
> It gives the same result - an easy way to see changes subsequent to
> that merge, and an easy way to "checkout" the code at that tag.

I can see copying URLs around to do diffs and all to be a little harder to use 
though than just typing in the tag you want, especially when you know the format 
of your tag.

I guess its a case of 'svn switch' to the tag or 'svn update' to the revision 
that you want.  Both are some work.  Although switching to a tag is probably 
easier.  I would do

1) svn info
2) Double click the URL to copy it into my copy/paste buffer
3) Type in 'svn switch'.
4) Paste the URL and change it.

This is less work than parsing a log file looking for a particular revision.

But I think in this gcc case, if this branch gettting the merges is only getting 
merges, then using PREV is the easiest and fastest way to go.  The tagging and 
the revision finding can be skipped.

Regards,
Blair