Version Control with Subversion

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Chapter 4: Branching and Merging

with the crawl-in-a-hole strategy is that by the time you’re finished with your branch,

it may be near impossible to merge your changes back into the trunk without a huge

number of conflicts.

Instead, you and Sally might continue to share changes as you work. It’s up to you to

decide which changes are worth sharing; Subversion gives you the ability to selec-

tively copy changes between branches. And when you’re completely finished with

your branch, your entire set of branch changes can be copied back into the trunk.

Copying Specific Changes

In the previous section, we mentioned that both you and Sally made changes to

integer.c on different branches. If you look at Sally’s log message for revision 344,

you can see that she fixed some spelling errors. No doubt, your copy of the same file

still has the same spelling errors. It’s likely that your future changes to this file will be

affecting the same areas that have the spelling errors, so you’re in for some potential

conflicts when you merge your branch someday. It’s better, then, to receive Sally’s

change now, before you start working too heavily in the same places.

It’s time to use the

svn merge command. This command, it turns out, is a very close

cousin to the

svn diff command (which you read about in ...