Re: [boost] [SVN] Spurious changes to lots of files....

Subject: Re: [boost] [SVN] Spurious changes to lots of files....
From: Eric Niebler (eric_at_[hidden])
Date: 2012-04-07 12:25:57

On 4/6/2012 11:37 AM, Daniel James wrote:
> On 6 April 2012 18:59, John Maddock <boost.regex_at_[hidden]> wrote:
>>
>> As well as cluttering up the revision logs, this often leads to property
>> and/or tree conflicts when merging your own stuff, and I can't tell you how
>> annoying that is to figure out! :-(
>>
>> BTW, my sincere apologies to Eric here - he just happened to be the latest
>> culprit - can some SVN guru suggest how to prevent this sort of spurious
>> changing going on?
> 
> It's updating merge metadata, because at some point someone has
> explicitly merged to that file which causes it to track its own
> merges. For that reason it's generally a bad idea to merge to
> individual files. Ironically, Eric is actually doing the right thing
> by doing a full tree merge. The good news is that when subversion
> 1.7.x only updates merge metadata for files and directories that have
> actually changed so this will be less of a problem as people upgrade
> (although it's still a bad idea to merge to individual files, because
> it complicates merges and makes them slower).

Right. My understanding has always been that merges should be done at
the root. I didn't know why (now I do, thanks Daniel), but I've followed
the recommended procedure religiously. Now I will upgrade to 1.7.3.

Daniel, is there any way to clean up the merge info Boost-wide and bring
these stray files back into the fold?

-- 
Eric Niebler
BoostPro Computing
http://www.boostpro.com