Question

Hallo experts,

A simple question from me, an old newbie to Tortoise SVN.

I’m working on a branch, and want now to merge the changes in my branch (after commit) to the trunk. However I’m not sure about the correct workflow. Should I first merge the trunk to my working copy, after resolving all the possible conflicts, then reintegrate my branch to the trunk? Since most of my colleague are still in holidays, I cannot get any advices on such basics in my team.

Thanks a lot in advance,

John in Munich

Answer 1

Yes.

Not sure what else to add given that you said it all 🙂

It’s worth noting that the reintegrate feature basically makes your branch useless for further development so it must be the last step ever, right before branch deletion, so try to avoid until you’re fully sure that the code is production ready. If unsure, you can do a regular merge from branch to trunk. Why the feature even exists is something that I’ve never been able to grasp; I suppose it’s a side effect of Subversion’s poor merge tracking.

I also suggest you don’t perform all merges at once and, instead, try to divide them into smaller sets and commit your work between merges. If you get a merge conflict you can’t easily fix you want to be able to revert.

Update: The official Version Control with Subversion books says this:

In Subversion 1.5, once a
–reintegrate merge is done from branch to trunk, the branch is no
longer usable for further work. It’s
not able to correctly absorb new trunk
changes, nor can it be properly
reintegrated to trunk again. For this
reason, if you want to keep working on
your feature branch, we recommend
destroying it and then re-creating it
from the trunk

http://svnbook.red-bean.com/nightly/en/svn.branchmerge.basicmerging.html#svn.branchemerge.basicmerging.reintegrate