Question

For instance, suppose I have a branch that I want to update with the new stuff in trunk. I’ve always just merged trunk into the new branch, but I came across a somewhat different process that Divmod uses. Does divmod have some kind of special requirement to do branching like this, or have I been doing it wrong all along?

Answer 1

The way you’re currently doing it is the way the Subversion Book suggests.

It appears that Divmod does things this way because of the pre-1.5 merge syntax:

As one example of such a problem, in
SVN one must always pass the revision
where the branch was created on trunk
as an argument to the merge command,
and determining that number involves
reading the output of another
long-running command. Some branches
cannot be merged in this manner,
depending on where the branch was
originally created from.

(Source)

This is no longer true.