Historic merge "done wrong" doesn't work in up to date working copy

[Kris Deugau <kd...@vianet.ca>]

I've been maintaining a set of spam filter rule files in Subversion for 
some time.  On the client side this has been almost entirely with 1.6.x 
on CentOS 5.

I've just recently done a major refresh on my PC, switching to the 
current Debian stable release, with Subversion 1.8.10.

The directory structure I've suddenly found I've been merging 
incorrectly looks like:

dev/
   file1.cf
   file2.cf
   file3.cf
   ...
prod/
   file1.cf
   file3.cf
   ...

(Note a small number of files were added in dev/, but have not been 
copied to prod/.  IIRC the few files added to SVN in dev/ but not prod/ 
got added by the merge, then revert'ed, then OS-rm'ed.)

dev/ and prod/ were created at the same time, in r1.  Files were created 
in dev/, then svn cp'ed to prod/.

With the old 1.6 client, I was able to "svn merge ^/dev" in prod/, and 
it did what I expected;  merge all changes to the relevant files (and 
add the occasional new file) from dev/ to prod/.  merginfo is only 
maintained on the prod/ directory, not individual files.

With 1.8, it's now complaining that dev/ and prod/ have no common ancestor.

What can I do to get unstuck?

-kgd

Re: Historic merge "done wrong" doesn't work in up to date working copy

[Stefan Sperling <st...@elego.de>]

On Mon, Jan 23, 2017 at 11:29:03AM -0500, Kris Deugau wrote:
> I've been maintaining a set of spam filter rule files in Subversion for some
> time.  On the client side this has been almost entirely with 1.6.x on CentOS
> 5.
> 
> I've just recently done a major refresh on my PC, switching to the current
> Debian stable release, with Subversion 1.8.10.
> 
> The directory structure I've suddenly found I've been merging incorrectly
> looks like:
> 
> dev/
>   file1.cf
>   file2.cf
>   file3.cf
>   ...
> prod/
>   file1.cf
>   file3.cf
>   ...
> 
> (Note a small number of files were added in dev/, but have not been copied
> to prod/.  IIRC the few files added to SVN in dev/ but not prod/ got added
> by the merge, then revert'ed, then OS-rm'ed.)
> 
> dev/ and prod/ were created at the same time, in r1.  Files were created in
> dev/, then svn cp'ed to prod/.
> 
> With the old 1.6 client, I was able to "svn merge ^/dev" in prod/, and it
> did what I expected;  merge all changes to the relevant files (and add the
> occasional new file) from dev/ to prod/.  merginfo is only maintained on the
> prod/ directory, not individual files.
> 
> With 1.8, it's now complaining that dev/ and prod/ have no common ancestor.
> 
> What can I do to get unstuck?
> 
> -kgd

You could use the --ignore-ancestry option but because this disables merge
tracking you'll also either need to specify one or more revisions to merge,
or use the 2-URL merge syntax. See 'svn help merge' for more details.

For the long term, I would recommend to reconcile the branches, then delete
one of the branches and recreate it as a copy of the other.