Version Control with Subversion, 2nd Edition

Advanced Merging

Here ends the automated magic. Sooner or later, once you get the hang of branching and merging, you’re going to have to ask Subversion to merge specific changes from one place to another. To do this, you’re going to have to start passing more complicated arguments to svn merge. The next section describes the fully expanded syntax of the command and discusses a number of common scenarios that require it.

Cherrypicking

Just as the term “changeset” is often used in version control systems, so is the term cherrypicking. This word refers to the act of choosing one specific changeset from a branch and replicating it to another. Cherrypicking may also refer to the act of duplicating a particular set of (not necessarily contiguous!) changesets from one branch to another. This is in contrast to more typical merging scenarios, where the “next” contiguous range of revisions is duplicated automatically.

Why would people want to replicate just a single change? It comes up more often than you’d think. For example, let’s go back in time and imagine that you haven’t yet merged your private feature branch back to the trunk. At the water cooler, you get word that Sally made an interesting change to integer.c on the trunk. Looking over the history of commits to the trunk, you see that in revision 355 she fixed a critical bug that directly affects the feature you’re working on. You might not be ready to merge all the trunk changes to your branch just yet, but you certainly need that particular ...