[Svnmerge] Remembering conflict resolutions to avoid double manual resolutions

[Micah Elliott]

I have a simple use case that seems very common, but doesn't work
with svnmerge:  1) A developer is merging changes from trunk to his
branch, and a conflict occurs.  He resolves it in favor of his
branch's version.  Then 2) he merges his branch back to trunk and
*the same conflict has to be resolved again*.

Why isn't there some ability to record that he has already
resolved this same conflict?  (I can share my thoughts on how to
approach a solution to this, but for now I'm just asking in case
this is a pilot error on my part.)

I'm not sure what the technical name is for this ability.  I
thought it was "reflection", but svnmerge appears to use that
name in a different way.

This was touched on briefly before in this thread:

    http://www.orcaware.com/pipermail/svnmerge/2007-February/000857.html

And the answer basically was:

    "it seems that the conflict will have to be resolved manually
    for both merges ... and with the current design of svnmerge,
    this cannot really be fixed."

Other VCSs (e.g, bzr) are able to handle this automatically,
i.e., just a single resolution initially on the branch, which is
cleanly auto-applied on merging back up to trunk.

I believe this ability was discussed on the dev at SVN ML
(http://www.nabble.com/Issue-2897-revisited.-Really.-tt14014212.html),
in a more comprehensive way, but I don't know if the 1.5
implementation will handle all the details.  And anyway, I'm
stuck with adopting 1.4 for my deployment, and I suspect many
others won't be able to start using 1.5 until 2009 (for various
reasons), so svnmerge.py is still a very relevant tool.

Is there a good reason that this can't be implemented/fixed in
svnmerge.py for some/most merge situations?

-- 
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                          |V|icah |- lliott
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