svn merge --reintegrate fails on “missing ranges”

Question

The situation is like this:

A team worked on long-term feature branch (18 months). Periodically merging trunk back to this feature branch (at the beginning every month, later every two/three months).

Today we want to merge the feature branch back to trunk, using the reintegrate feature.

The problem is that we get a lot (thousands!) of:

branches/feature/dir/file.foo
Missing ranges: /trunk/dir/file.foo:94959

But, when I'm checking the svn log, I can see that range 94000-96500 was indeed merged some time in the past.

What is happening here? Why svn is complaining on "missing ranges" if it is not true? Can there be a reason that r94959 will be missing if I see merge info on 94000-96500? How can I fix this (as i said we're talking about thousands of revisions "missing")?

Thank you for your help.

Answer 1

This normally happens in a following scenario:

1. Your trunk had a some two branches like branch1 and branch2 working parallely.
2. branch1 created first and then branch2 created. But, branch2 changes completed first and those are reintegrated to trunk.
3. After that before the reintegrating branch1 , we need to do an svn merge (not svn merge --reintegrate ) from trunk to branch1 and resolve the conflicts.
4. And during this, we may get some folders also with changes in properties with an update in some merge-info . If we, don't commit these folders since these are just merge-info property changes only, then it can cause a similar issue in during reintegrate merge of branch1 .

If this is your scenario, the solution you can try is to do an svn merge from your trunk to branch1 again and you will get your merge-info properties updated in your folders again and commit those to branch1 . Then, try again with svn merge --reintegrate from branch1 to trunk.