What is the proper way to do a Subversion merge in

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

Firstly, if you are seeing ">>>>>" and such in your files when you view them in Eclipse, this probably means that you are not looking at the file with the proper compare editor. Try right-clicking on the file in the Project view or Synchronize view and selecting "Edit Conflicts" to bring up a compare editor that will show you the conflicting regions graphically rather than as text. Note that the compare editor that comes up for "Edit Conflicts" is different from the one that you get when you just doubleclick on a file in the Synchronize view -- the doublieclick compare editor shows the differences between your current file and the way it existed when you last checked it out or updated it, while the Edit Conflicts compare dialog shows the differences between two sources of changes (for instance, the changes you merged versus the changes that existed in your workspace before you merged).

Secondly, you may wish to be aware of a bug in some versions of the Eclipse subversive plugin which causes all files that accepted merge changes to be incorrectly marked as having conflicts. This bug has been fixed, but a lot of people don't seem to have updated to get the fix yet. Further details here:

https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=312585

Answer 2

Use Eclipse integration, it works perfectly fine.

The main change from CVS, is that you only merge deltas from a branch, ie changes from one revision to another. That is to say you have to track the correct start revision somehow (unless you have svn 1.5 merge history)

If you got that right, it's only up to you to get the changes right with the compare editor.

Answer 3

Remember that with svn reverting a modified tree to a clean state is fairly easy. Simply have a clean workspace on the merge destination branch and run the merge command to import the modifications from the merge source branch, then synchronize your workspace and you will get your usual eclipse comparison window showing all the merge modified files and the conflicts.

If for some reason you can't solve the conflicts you can svn revert on the project and go back to a clean state, otherwise you do the merge in place and once you are done you can commit. Note that you don't have to commit, once you are done handling the conflicts you can also return to the dev view, verify that the code compiles, run your unit tests, whatever and then synchronize again and commit (once the conflict are locally resolved they won't come back)

last time I looked, when you use subclipse merge command it will overwrite the merged file (using conflict markers to show conflicting areas) and put the original left and right side of the merge in the same place. it shouldn't put anything in different directories.

As a rule of thumb, it is best to commit all merge modifications in a single commit and to only have the merge modifications in the commit so that you can rollback the merge later if needed.