[Svnmerge] Log of merges

[Giovanni Bajo]

Blair Zajac <blair at orcaware.com> wrote:

> Is the merged to location getting any commits over than from svnmerge?

Yes, it's for a development branch.

> The easiest way to go back three commits is to run
>
> $ svn update -r PREV
> $ svn update -r PREV
> $ svn update -r PREV

This is nice. It could grow a way to specify "3 times" on a single command line
to speed it up, but it's fine anyway. Sadly it doesn't help in my case because
the branch gets development on its own, so the merges made by svnmerge are just
some of the commits.

> I don't really see the use of this yet.


The use case is like this. Assume a development branch, with regular merges
from head (complete merges, no cherry-picking). You find out something is
broken in your branch, which does not appear related to the work you are doing
in the branch. To find out if this bug is unrelated to the branch and was just
imported from the last merge, you will want to revert back to "just before" the
last merge, and "just after". Maybe also get and test a pristine working copy
of the head at the point of the last merge. So the question is: which is the
commit of my last merge?

With a tag-based merging system, you "svn ls" your tags, and find immediate
pointers to the information you need. With svnmerge, the best you can do is
call "svn log" and grep the log until you find the merge. What I'm proposing,
is just an automation of this. I just want to give users a way to find
information about all the merges they have done in the branch, for whatever use
they might want.

Giovanni Bajo