I am facing a really annoying issue with SVN merge. I want to merge the trunk into a branch. Usually, it is rather simple, but this time, due to heavy changes, I had to process step-by-step and SVN does not seem to appreciate that.
Lets say I created a branch at revision A, and now the repository is at revision B. The trunk contains few sub dir, say S1, S2. To give you an idea of the complexity, B is ~1000 revisions after A, with many changes in the trunk. There were a LOT of conflicts and tree conflicts.
To process step by step, I choose to merge S1 firstly, then S2, then I hoped the merge of B will be immediate. I used the command svn merge https://myrepo/trunk/S1 myBranchWorkingCopy/S1
S1 merge was painful but successful. Same for S2.
Full of hope, I launch a dry-run of svn merge --dry-run https://myrepo/trunk myBranchWorkingCopy, waiting to see only updated properties. I was overzealous... Instead of that, EVERY conflicts (tree or text) I resolved for S1 or S2 must be resolved again...
My conclusion is
If trunk contains S1 + S2, merged(S1) + merged(S2) != merged(trunk) ?!?
Did I miss something? How can I tell SVN than every subdirs have be merged and that the trunk should be merged instantly?
Thanks
It should work by merging back to the subfolders with the --record-only flag so Subversion knows the changes are there on both sides. See the section on "Keeping a Reintegrated Branch Alive" in the Advanced Merging section of the Subversion book.
(Maybe try it out on a little sample first.)