TortoiseSVN trunk and branches merging

Question

I'm no SVN expert or come from that background so I'm not very sure what I'm going to ask is stupid or it makes any sense to you. Here it goes.

The team I working with is adopting SVN and we're currently doing dev on branch. Everytime we done something, we have to manually replicate everything back to trunk (Yes, manually redo line-by-line into the trunk code).

I'm not sure how everyone else do it with SVN, but apparently, this seems so wrong for me.

There got to be a better way of doing this, SVN merging for example? (although I don't really understand how SVN merge the code and resolving conflicts etc)

Can someone shed some light please?

Answer 1

Yes, using SVN merging is the right way. Doing it via (for example) TortoiseSVN make it (mostly) easy. Screenshot below shows you the merge options to chose.

One hint for merging: to have a correct trunk-branch relation is a good base for less conflicts. Merging conflicts is like you said "reading line-by-line" of conflict and decide witch line is the correct one.

But first of all I can recommend you site like this to get into the topic. After that feel free to come back here with special (concrete) problems. You are not a new user so I think you know how to use SO :-)