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Subversion branch reintegration
10 answers
Per this old question, using SVN 1.5, reintegrating a branch multiple times is problematic, and should be avoided.
There has been some rumbling to the effect that, "This is a known issue, and should be fixed in SVN 1.6." Was that the case? Is it fixed? Can I reintegrate multiple times?
To merge a branch topic into the trunk repeatedly: Do the following on every merge.
svn merge --reintegrate <topic> <trunk>
, as you would normally. (=> r
M
)
svn merge --record-only -c M ^/<trunk> <topic>
. Note the record-only
option.
Step 2 essentially tells the topic branch to consider the merge commit (revision M
, from step 1) part of its history. This merge-revision is the one that usually causes problems during reintegration; svn tries to undo rM when integrating topic a second time.
So, repeated reintegration works, just not automatically. :)
I eventually found this solution through an enlightening commit message to the svn source and the matching test (search for "def multiple_reintegrates"). This is a "clever trick" discovered and used by svn-devs with the current releases. It's even been added to more recent documentation. The result is still not as good as a DVCS's merging properties, but it's at least functional.
The only broad downside (as per an open issue as of June 2, 2010) is that apparently the svn log -g
output is messy. I guess this is the risk.
While 1.6 did indeed fix issues with merge tracking, I don't think you can re-use an integrated branch.
But this is not an issue. Since the branch got fully integrated into the trunk, just delete it and create a new branch (with the same name) in its place.
Yes, you can. The problem you ask about was solved in Subversion 1.8.
Beginning with SVN 1.8, --reintegrate
option is deprecated and reintegrate merges are now performed automatically (or automagically :) ). See Subversion 1.8 Release Notes and read updated SVNBook 1.8 | Reintegrating a branch chapter:
If you choose not to delete your branch after reintegrating it to the
trunk you may continue to perform sync merges from the trunk and then
reintegrate the branch again. If you do this, only the changes made on
your branch after the first reintegrate are merged to the trunk.
...
Only Subversion 1.8 supports this reuse of a feature branch. Earlier
versions require some special handling before a feature branch can be
reintegrated more than once. See the earlier version of this chapter
for more information:
http://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.7/svn.branchmerge.basicmerging.html#svn.branchemerge.basicmerging.reintegrate
IMPORTANT: You should upgrade your Subversion client and server if you still use Subversion 1.7 or older. The current and best version of SVN is 1.9 as of year 2016. There is no real reason to be using very old Subversion releases such as 1.5, 1.6 or even 1.7. There were numerous improvements on client and server side since version 1.6!