Reintegrate to the branch (not the trunk) in Subversion (SVN)

Question

I know there is the --reintegrate option in Subversion (SVN) 1.6 to merge a feature branch back to the trunk.

My workflow is a little more complex:

We have feature branches - we merge trunk to them often. But we don't put them back to trunk right away. Instead we create a release branch off the trunk, and merge feature branches to release branch. At this point we get a lot of tree conflicts (since lot of changes exist both in feature branch and the trunk).

Option --reintegrate must help in this scenario, but it looks like --reintegrate doesn't work when merging to the branch other than trunk. Is that true?

Answer 1

It's news to me that you can't use the --reintegrate option on any branch besides trunk . Subversion doesn't have any standard on naming or the placement of branches, so there's no way that trunk is special. To Subversion, branches , trunk , and tags are mere directories. These directories are only special to us because we said so.

The --reintegrate option has to do with the fact that if I merge from branch A to branch B , and then try to merge back from branch B to branch A , I might be attempting to merge stuff back to branch A that was initially in branch A . The --reintegrate option lets Subversion know that I am reversing the direction of my merge, and to not consider stuff in branch B that was really the result of merging from branch A .

Reintegration is an issue in any version control system that actually tracks merged changes. In any case, there's no reason why --reintegrate must involve a branch called trunk . Otherwise, there's no real need for the option. All Subversion has to do is see you're merging into a branch called trunk and realize it's probably a reintegration.