svn: mergeinfo entries from before the branch was created

Question

I have a development branch which is completely reintegrated into trunk, but the mergeinfo property on trunk has a huge list of revisions against that branch which are from before the branch was created.

I'm guessing that there probably used to be a branch of the same name which wasn't integrated completely before it was deleted.

I realize they are probably not doing any harm but I'd like to get rid of them purely for asthetic reasons. Is it safe to just delete them manually or should I leave well alone for fear of unintended consequences?

Answer 1

The good news is: you can not really break SVN by manipulating svn:mergeinfo The only thing which is not working correctly is mergin resulting in more and complicated conflicts. So you could remove this lines(you should check before if your assumption about the deleted branch are true).

However, if someone digs out the obsolete(deleted) branch and tries to merge it into trunk again, do not cry for mama :)

I once had a customer who made a real mess with dozens of branches and subbranches and the only way to start over was deleting all mergeinfo on the whole repository and carefully try to merge again in a structured manner. But there was no functional defect in deleting the mergeinfo.