Re: [boost] svnmerge.py

From: Beman Dawes (bdawes_at_[hidden])
Date: 2007-11-02 09:17:47

David Abrahams wrote:
> on Thu Nov 01 2007, Beman Dawes <bdawes-AT-acm.org> wrote:
> 
>> David Abrahams wrote:
>>> I hope everyone is using http://www.orcaware.com/svn/wiki/Svnmerge.py
>>> when merging changes between branches and trunk.  That's very
>>> important if we're going to avoid merge hell.
>> The plan isn't to do what the TortoiseSVN docs call a "Range of 
>> Revisions" merge, but rather what those docs call "Merging Two Different 
>> Trees". 
> 
> Do I have to learn about TortoiseSVN in order to understand what
> you're saying?  I don't really use Windows for development anymore.

I spent about 20 minutes searching online for documentation or examples 
of using the merge command to do what is really a copy. I also checked 
the "Version control with Subversion" book, both paper and online 
versions. The TortoiseSVN docs are the only place I can find that 
mentions this use case.

>> Since in effect that just copies the file from the trunk to the 
>> release branch, there isn't any chance of merge hell, if I understand 
>> what you mean. This approach also minimizes the chance that the code 
>> will break, since the code is unchanged from the code being tested on 
>> the trunk.
>>
>> Is there any reason to use svnmerge.py for a tree/tree merge?
> 
> Probably, especially if you're ever merging back and forth between two
> trees.

But we aren't really merging. We are copying, using the merge command to 
do the copy because the copy command doesn't have an overwrite option.

Hopefully the whole synmerge.py issue will go away once we change over 
to 1.5.

--Beman