How to merge from branch to trunk (was: No Subject)

[Ulrich Eckhardt <ec...@satorlaser.com>]

Note up front: Choosing a meaningful subject makes sure your question is not 
getting ignored.

On Monday 08 March 2010, Ramachandran, Vishwanath(IE10) wrote:
> In a subversion working copy(XYZ), we are doing development in different
> branches. So the TRUNK contains the code base that is released to
> market.

So far, that is not unusual. However, maintenance releases normally occur from 
maintenance (bugfixing) branches. Further, I would tag something before 
releasing it. ;)

> There are different branches which are having different version of XYZ
> source.
>
> Currently we want to merge XYZ 1.2 version of branch to TRUNK.
>
>
> So instead of merge, we thought of doing COPY, because merge will take
> lot of efforts here because the trunk and the branch are different
> versions altogether.

Huh? About the copying, I'd say that that is a bad idea, because it breaks the 
history line of the trunk. I'd rather use merge.

Now, what I don't understand is why trunk and the branch are altogether 
different. Normally, you create a (feature) branch from trunk and then both 
for some time develop independently. Then, when the branch is stable, you 
merge the development back into trunk. Since both have a common ancestor, 
those merges should work. They should not be completely different.

Note: If they are too different to easily merge, you should perhaps update 
your branch with changes from the trunk more often. This helps identifying 
conflicts earlier and keeping them less severe.

> So for COPY, we are planning to do the following steps.
>
> 1) Move the TRUNK to a TAG using the SVN MOVE command.
>
> (2) Copy the BCM-WEB_1.2.0_BUILD24_RELEASE_RC1 TAG to the TRUNK.
>
>
> No need to do an explicit delete/commit on the trunk because svn move
> does a svn copy + svn delete and requires an immediate commit.
>
>
>
> Please review the steps and let us know its fine in terms of retaining
> SVN history etc....

Actually, I'd say no, but I don't know what happened to trunk between forking 
off the branch and trying to merge it back. If I see that the trunk is 
replaced with a branch, that means to me that the development in trunk was 
abandoned and thrown away in favour of the development in the branch. If that 
is what you want to express, okay, otherwise I'd really just merge the 
changes into trunk.

Uli

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