In my existing (Pre-SVN 1.5) merge strategy, we create a copy of the Trunk (called BasePoint) at the moment of branch-creation for referencing later during the merge.
Whe
The short answer is, You still have to do both steps.
The SVN book explains the process for merging as:
Notice the lack of revision numbers. This probably doesn't feel like a huge win. The new coolness is the ability to re-run the merge as you are coding in your branch, allowing you to keep the branch up to date with changes in trunk (without recording revision numbers by hand!). SVN keeps track of what needs to be merged in from trunk and what changes are unique to the branch. When you are done with the branch, --reintegrate uses that data to automatically merge only the branch changes back to trunk.