Question

I’m pretty used to how to do CVS merges in Eclipse, and I’m otherwise happy with the way that both Subclipse and Subversive work with the SVN repository, but I’m not quite sure how to do merges properly.

When I do a merge, it seems to want to stick the merged files in a seperate directory in my project rather than overwriting the old files that are to be replaced in the merge, as I am used to in CVS.

The question is not particular to either Subclipse or Subversive.

Thanks for the help!

Answer 1

I would advise not trying to use Eclipse’s plugins as your primary access to Subversion.

If you are developing on Windows, TortoiseSVN is the best program that I have seen for Subversion access. Explore to the directory of which you wish to merge, right click on it and use the Tortoise SVN merge option. Assuming a non-interactive merge, once you get conflicts, you’ll have to go through each conflicted file and edit the conflicts before marking them as resolved. For this process I recommend a program called KDiff3, which shows your local repository copy (what was stored in the .svn before the merge), your local copy (including any changes), and the copy coming from the repository, and allows you to easily see (and even hand-modify if needed) the result of the merging. It also handles a bunch of minor conflicts automatically.

KDiff3 is portable, TortoiseSVN is a windows shell extension, so if you’re using another environment, I would try to just use SVN to merge. But that would be much more of a pain 🙂