[Svnmerge] Question about usage with developer branches

[Jon Schewe]

On Thu, 2007-08-16 at 16:55 -0400, Raman Gupta wrote:
> Jon Schewe wrote:
> > On Thu, 2007-08-16 at 14:23 -0400, Raman Gupta wrote:
> >> Could you post the results of the same merge with -vv.
> > 
> > Doing that I realize that it's trying to merge from another developer
> > branch instead of the trunk.  What would cause that?
> 
> Its probably because when the branch was created, it was created as a
> copy of trunk. Since trunk has the merge props to the other developer
> branch, those properties got copied over to your development branch.
> Also, you probably never initialized merging with the trunk after
> creating the second developer branch (otherwise you would have got a
> warning about multiple merge sources, and that you should use -S).
> 
Actually I think it has to do with how I was trying to fix the errors I
had received earlier.  Both developer branches had been initted
properly, however when I did the merge from trunk to my developer branch
I think I messed up the property.

> You should uninit the other developer branch and init merging with the
> trunk. Perhaps svnmerge should grow an "svn init --cp" (or similar)
> command that handles this automatically -- it would do the copy,
> uninit merging to any existing branches, and init branching with the
> source branch.

Ok, I've done that.  Will I have problems because I've merged both
directions on this branch already?

> 
> A lot of people would say, as they have said in the past, that such a
> feature "loses information". Whatever the merits of that argument, the
> sad truth is that this "carry-over" merge information causes problems
> more often than not (just as in your case). This is because merging
> has essentially been "initialized" between branches even though the
> user never explicitly requested it (other than tangentially due to an
> svn cp). That said, if graph merging was fully supported, then it
> would be ok to keep that info, since it is useful in that case.
Are there plans to support graph merging?

> 
> > Also, should svnmerge be able to handle such merges?  Between branches
> > and between the trunk and a branch?
> 
> Yes, as long as the branching reduces to unidirectional or
> bidirectional merging between branches. For example:
> 
> A <-> B <-> C is ok, but
> 
> A <-> B <-> C <-> A is not
> 
> The latter is an example of the graph merging that has come up in
> previous posts. If you were to actually use the developer branch to
> developer branch merging in your use case, you would definitely run
> into problems since that is an example of the second case above (where
> A is trunk and B and C are developer branches).
> 
Got it, I'll have to avoid this then.

Thanks for your help.


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