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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-12T08:10:09+00:00

I don’t know when the svn team decided to inflict tree conflicts on us

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I don’t know when the svn team decided to inflict tree conflicts on us but it has completely broken the merge functionality of svn.

I have a branch and I want to merge the latest changes from the trunk into the branch. I’ve already done one such merge, but this one fails because of a tree conflict. Here’s the command:

$ svn --force merge -r 3185:3192 svn://chamar2/rx-services/SAMS .
svn: Attempt to add tree conflict that already exists

The first time I tried this merge (without the --force) it only created the tree conflict and did not merge anything. Now it just reports the message above.

If I do svn status on the branch working copy it shows all the files that have changes that have not been merged back to the trunk yet. Of course, the purpose of my branch is to do these changes where they are not yet in the trunk.

What were they thinking when they did this?

I haven’t found any usable information on what causes tree conflicts and how I can continue to work now that svn has created these things.

Is there a way to tell svn to forget about tree conflicts and just do the merge like it used to?

I’m using a 1.6 client and an older svn server (probably 1.3.1).

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    The problem turned out to be that I had chosen the parent/ directory as the source of the merge instead of the parent/trunk/ directory. It was user error, but the tree conflict message is confusing. If svn had just gone ahead and done the merge I would have seen the problem instantly.

    Tree conflicts have introduced new message semantics that will take some getting used to.

    Thanks for the pointer to the Tortoise documentation on Tree Conflicts. It is the only documentation I’ve seen that addresses working on branches. The example given doesn’t explain why I got tree conflicts on the files I had modified on the branch, however. The tree conflict messages are going to take some getting used to.

    It looks like all you do in most cases is mark the tree conflicts resolved, and in these cases it looks like tree conflicts are just noise.

    Mark Phippard says that an older server version won’t cause tree conflicts. The server only needs to be updated if you want merge tracking support and your server is pre-1.5. Apparently merge tracking is the only thing missing from older svn servers:

    http://eclipse.open.collab.net/ds/viewMessage.do?dsForumId=62&dsMessageId=332448
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