Can I turn off automatic merging in Subversion?

Question

We\'re looking at moving from a check-out/edit/check-in style of version control system to Subversion, and during the evaluation we discovered that when you perform an Update ac

Answer 1

I would suggest you should learn to work with the natural Subversion model if at all possible. In practice we find conflicts are rare, and the type of logic conflict you talk about almost non-existent (I can't recall an instance in the last 4 years in our repository).

Team members should check-in changes on as small a scale as possible (whilst maintaining correctness) rather than batching up a whole days work to just check it in once. This will reduce the possibility of stepping on someone else's work.

If you are concerned about about a particular change you are making Subversion does provide a locking mechanism to let you prevent other changes to the file. See the Red Book chapters on locking.