[Svnmerge] Merging blocked revisions between branches

[Blair Zajac]

David James wrote:
> On 3/22/06, Alan Barrett <apb at cequrux.com> wrote:
> 
>>On Tue, 21 Mar 2006, David James wrote:
>>
>>>Here's two options, both of which would be consistent:
>>>1) Never merge 'blocked revisions' between branches. If you ask
>>>svnmerge.py to not merge r10 from branchA to branchB, and then merge
>>>changes from branchB to branchC, you've only asked svnmerge to block a
>>>merge of r10 from branchA to branchB. r10 is still available to merge
>>>from branchA to branchC.
>>>2) Always merge 'blocked revisions'  between branches. If you ask
>>>svnmerge.py to not merge r10 from branchA to branchB, and then merge
>>>changes from branchB to branchC, you've therefore asked svnmerge.py to
>>>not merge r10 from branchA to branchC.
>>
>>I favour option 1.  If the user wants to merge from A to C both
>>indirectly "A --> B --> C" and also directly "A --> C", then presumably
>>they have their own good reasons for that.  Marking a change as "not
>>wanted in branch B" shouldn't be interpreted as "not wanted in branch
>>C".
> 
> 
> It's also possible that the user may have marked the change as "not
> wanted in branch B", because they manually merged it from branch A to
> branch B. In that case, we'd want to include the blockprop metadata
> changes with any merges from branch B.

In that case, I actually prefer to update the svnmerge-integrated property by 
hand to indicate that the revision has been merged over, otherwise it may be 
confusing to see a blocked revision which indicates that the revision was never 
merged over, even when it was.

This is more a way of setting up svnmerge.py for other developers than myself, 
since I'll hopefully remember that that revision was merged over.  If another 
developer were to look at the source code, they would think that the revision 
was not merged over.

> Is 'svnmerge.py block -rX' the canonical way to indicate that you've
> manually merged a particular change? Or is there another way to do it?

Maybe we should come up with a way to indicate that.

Right now the hacky way of doing that is to do the merge and revert everything 
but the properties on the directory receiving the merge.

Regards,
Blair

-- 
Blair Zajac, Ph.D.
<blair at orcaware.com>
Subversion training, consulting and support
http://www.orcaware.com/svn/