Best practices regarding merging bugfixes from trunk into a feature branch using TortoiseSVN

Question

I have a case where my branch represents a new version which in it there is a refactored data layer, however all of the bug fixes are applied to the trunk.
Am I doing something the oppsite way since all of the documentation that I have encountered refer only to merging a branch back into the trunk.
I would still like to keep the version branch and the bug fixes in sync, how can it be done easily?
Especially if there are conflicts due to the fact that the version branch has many changes to it's directory hierarchy and files.
What exactly is the best practice in this case?

Answer 1

Subversion knows the scenario of a "feature branch":

http://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.1/ch04s04.html#svn-ch-4-sect-4.4.2

I think this applies to some degree to your situation. The idea is there too get the changes from the trunk to the branch so that it is later easier to re-integrate to the trunk. My experience with subversion however is that this will not run as smoothly as you would like. Other systems like Git or Mercurial supposedly do a better job with something like this.

Answer 2

Am I doing something the oppsite way since all of the documentation that I have encountered refer only to merging a branch back into the trunk.

trunk is also a branch. Nothing to fret.

I would still like to keep the version branch and the bug fixes in sync, how can it be done easily?

merge the trunk to the feature branch regularly and repetitively.

Especially if there are conflicts due to the fact that the version branch has many changes to it's directory hierarchy and files.

svn is known to do merging badly. No luck here. You will have to manually correct the conflicts. You have a unit testing suite, right?