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

Subject: Re: [boost] [SVN] Spurious changes to lots of files....
From: Jeremiah Willcock (jewillco_at_[hidden])
Date: 2012-04-07 13:21:44

On Sat, 7 Apr 2012, Eric Niebler wrote:

> 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.

That was my understanding as well (I was one of the other users on the 
list of large merge changes).  Should there be a policy requiring people 
merging changes into the release branch to use a certain minimum 
Subversion version?

-- Jeremiah Willcock