Yesterday I was working on ProbABEL, an open source package for running GWAS (genome-wide association studies). We use R-Forge and they provide us with a Subversion (SVN) server for revision control.
Some time ago we created a branch in which one of the co-developers is doing some major refactoring of the code. In the mean time I have been fixing bugs and adding new features to trunk. Now that the work in the refactoring branch comes to an end I thought it was high time to integrate the changes in trunk with the changes in the branch so that we can later promote the branch to trunk.
Since I had never done this before I decided to try the merge in the doc directory first, because I knew that in that directory nothing had changes since the branch was created, so all changes from trunk should be imported. At first I followed the SVN book instructions so I went into the doc dir in the branch and ran
$ svn merge ^/pkg/ProbABEL/doc
Unfortunately that didn’t work out. For some reasons conflicts appeared as wel as files that weren’t supposed to be there at all.
Thanks to Google and this blog post I found a solution. It boils down to explicitly telling SVN which revisions to use for the merge.
First I used
$ svn log | grep -C3 branch
to find out at which revision I created the branch:
------------------------------------------------------------------------
r864 | lckarssen | 2012-03-27 17:38:05 +0200 (Tue, 27 Mar 2012) | 1 line
Creating ProbABEL branch for code refactoring
Next I went to trunk and ran
$ svn update
At revision 987.
to find out at which revision trunk currently was. Back in the doc directory in the brach I ran
svn merge -r 864:987 ^/pkg/ProbABEL/doc
to merge al the changes since the branch was split off and it worked like a charm! All changes in trunk applied cleanly.
I then id the same for the other directories which also had changes in the branch. It turns out that when SVN find a conflict it is easier to postpone resolving the conflict because Emacs has a great SVN merge minor mode called SMerge! It highlights your changes vs. the incoming ones and allows you to select a resolution and move to the next conflict with a few easy keystrokes. After all conflicts have been resolved Emacs automtically removes the intermediate files SVN created and you are ready to commit.
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