How to 'fix' a SVN branch/tree conflict?

Question

I took over a software project and decided to put everything under SVN (on Assembla) using Tortoise SVN. The trunk is under ROOT. So the trunk contained the whole application (w

Answer 1

In general, SVN's merging support can only handle using a feature branch once. That is, you work in it and merge changes from trunk into it, and then use svn merge --reintegrate to merge it back into trunk when you're done.

After that, if you want to keep working, you need to create a new branch to work on. I think that you can delete the old one and make a new one in its place without losing data if you want to keep the same repository path, but you may want to try with a test repo first just in case the svn:merge info gets screwy.

This isn't perfect. See this post from when the current merge semantics were introduced for more detailed info.

Also, beware of any use of svn cp or svn mv for purposes other than branch and merge -- if you do this, you'll need to delete the spurious svn:merge properties they create (on both branch and trunk if need be) before running the reintegrate or it will fail will tree conflict messages.

On the whole, svn's branch and merge is still pretty weak compared to the distributed VCS family (git, hg, bzr, darcs, etc), but if you follow these guidelines it does the job.