When performing a \'svn merge\' from my development team\'s trunk into a branch, we occasionally experience merge conflicts that produce files with suffix names: *.mer
It seems that the "left" file is the last version where the file was the same in the trunk and the branch (for your question, but it would be between the source and dest in general).
If you've never merged changes from the trunk into your branch then this would be the version of the trunk when a branch (copy) was performed. Otherwise, it's the last version of the trunk that was merged and committed to this branch.
The left and right are what is used to create the diff that will be applied (as a patch) to the working file.
Let's say there are two branches, and last (HEAD
) revision in branch A
is 9
, while it is 6
in branch B
.
When cd B; svn merge -r 5:8 ^/braches/A
is ran, svn will try to apply delta between 5
and 8
from branch A
on top of branch B
.
(In other words, change sets 7
and 8
will be applied to B
)
common
ancestor left right
(1)━━┱───(3)──(5)──(7)──(8)──(9) # branch A
┃ └┄┄┄┄┬┄┄┄┄┘
┃ ↓
┗━(2)━━(4)━━(6) # branch B
working
If the delta applies cleanly, it's all good.
Let's say some lines were modified in change set 3
, and same source lines were modified differently in change set 4
.
If delta (5
→8
) doesn't touch those lines, all is still good.
If delta (5
→8
) also modified what 3
and 4
did, changes cannot be merged automatically, and svn leaves a file in conflict state:
file
--- file with (working
, left
, right
) delimitedfile.working
--- state of file in branch B@6
file.merge-left
--- state of file in branch A@5
file.merge-right
--- state of file in branch A@8
If you edit such a file manually, you have a few choices --- keep working
(your version), keep right
(their version; the other branch version) or merge the changes manually.
Left
is not useful in itself, there's no point to keep left
(their old version) in the file.
It is, however, useful for tools. left
→right
is the change set.
When you see, for example:
<<<<<<< .working
life_universe_and_everything = 13
||||||| .merge-left.r5
life_universe_and_everything = "13"
=======
life_universe_and_everything = "42"
>>>>>>> .merge-right.r8
In branch A
, "13"
(str) was changed to "42"
.
Branch B
had 13
(int).
Perhaps you want 42
(int) when you reconcile this conflict manually.
This question is similar to stackoverflow.com/questions/1673658/svnmerge-workflow but this one is more specific about the content of the conflict files.
You performed 3-side merge diring conflict-resolving (when merging 2 different files). It this operation 3 sources used
r*** extension just added to the same filename in order to have 3 files on merge
After successful merging and marking conflict as resolved temp-files must disappear automagically, if my memory served me well
file.merge-left.r4521 is the latest change of this file in the left branch (i.e. the origin) before the right branch (the destination) were created.
In other words, merge-left.r4521 it's the first version of the file to be merged
with merge-right.r5004 (the latest version of the destination branch)
For example, say you want to merge branches Left and Right as below:
Left 1 2 f.3 4 f.5 6 7 f.9 11
Right 8 f.10 f.12 13
Right is created in 8 ( is a copy of 7 )
file 'f' has been modified in 3, 5, 9, 10, 12
The merge of file 'f' will occur between 7 and 13 because
7 is the latest version of file f in Left before Right was created
13 is the latest version of Right