Question

I’m a newcomer to subversion. Recently, I’ve done some development in two different branches, where one of the branches was a branch of the other branch. I’ve merged down some changes from the first branch down to the trunk. However, when trying to merge down changes from the other branch to trunk, everything went haywire. That is, I’ve had a lot of conflicts, some of which I resolved (but not commited) and some of which are not. What worse is, a lot of the changes I made to the branch were for some reason not merged into the trunk. Now, my only question is, can I just do a revert on my working copy to return the trunk into its previous state? That is, will I mess something up by doing this? My taught is to start all over again and do it more carefully “by hand”.

Thanx!

Answer 1

As long as you always only do a merge into a clean and freshly updated working copy, you can always back out of the merging by reverting all the changes the merge did (plus the ones you did to solve conflicts).
Just be sure to never ever try to merge into a working copy that has uncommitted changes.

In order to minimize merge conflicts, you want to

• do one merge at a time (If for some reason you want to commit several merges at ones, you could create a temporary copy of your merge target, merge several branches into that, merge that back into your merge target, and delete it afterwards.)
• merge changes from the trunk into the branch first, resolving all arising conflicts
• always merge back changes from a branch into the trunk (or another branch, if they were created by copying that) using svn merge --reintegrate
• throw aways branches that you reintegrated from and create them anew instead