I have been using TortoiseSVN, svn, and subclipse and I think I understand the basics, but there’s one thing that’s been bugging me for a while: Merging introduces unwanted code. Here’s the steps.
trunk/test.txt@r2. A test file was created with ‘A’ and a return:
A [EOF] branches/TRY-XX-Foo/test.txt@r3. Branched out the trunk to TRY-XX-Foo:
A [EOF] branches/TRY-XX-Foo/test.txt@r4. Made an unwanted change in TRY-XX-Foo and committed it:
A B (unwanted change) [EOF] branches/TRY-XX-Foo/test.txt@r5. Made an important bug fix in TRY-XX-Foo and committed it:
A B (unwanted change) C (important bug fix) [EOF] Now, I would like to merge only the important bug fix back to trunk. So, I run merge for revision 4:5. What I end up in my working directory is a conflict.
trunk/test.txt:
A <<<<<<< .working ======= B (unwanted change) C (important bug fix) >>>>>>> .merge-right.r5 [EOF] Against my will, Subversion has now included ‘unwanted change’ into the trunk code, and I need to weed them out manually. Is there a way to merge only specified revisions when multiple consecutive changes are made in the branch?
The part of the problem is that B (unwated change) is included in .merge-right and I can’t tell the difference between which revision it came from. I usually use TortoiseMerge and here’s how it looks.
The problem is that both svn
and TortoiseSVN is treating the situation as 2-way merge. I’ve heard of the term 3-way merge, so I gave Beyond Compare a shot. With quick set up with TortoiseSVN, Edit Conflict now bring up the following screen. This is not perfect, since it’s still requiring human intervention, but at least I can tell which changes are coming from where.
See screenshot.