Subversion can't merge after a move

Question

I'm very new to Subversion, but I've used other revision control systems like ClearCase for years.

My boss asked me to fix this project so that it could be built with Maven instead of Ant. One of the important things I had to do to was to move src/com to src/main/java/com, and move test/com to src/test/java/com, which I did using the svn mv command. I foolishly assumed that since I used Subversion commands to move the directories, that Subversion would then know that things had been moved. And when I merged my branch into the trunk, it appeared to work. But now somebody else just finished work on a branch that he branched off before my work. So we go to merge his stuff into trunk, and basically Subversion appears to think “ok, he made changes to src/com/foo/bar/baz.java, but that directory doesn’t exist any more, so it’s irrelevant, so discard it” instead of what I expected, which was “ok, he made changes to src/com/foo/bar/baz.java, but src/com has been moved, so I need to merge that into src/main/java/com/foo/bar/baz.java”.

Is there a way to make Subversion do the revision management, or am I going to be manually merging this guy’s changes for the next two days?

Answer 1

To answer your question directly:

Is there a way to make Subversion do the revision management, or am I going to be manually merging this guy’s changes for the next two days?

You should be able to make it a little bit easier on yourself.

One thing that you can do to alleviate some of the pain (assuming a layout as follows)

/branch/foo/src/com
/branch/foo/test/com
/trunk/src/main/java/com
/trunk/src/test/java/com

Before you moved src/com to src/main/java/com and test/com to src/test/java/com you could have done:

cd $TRUNK
svn merge -r N:M http://server/branch/foo .

What you could do now is:

cd $TRUNK
svn merge -r N:M http://server/branch/foo/src/com src/main/java/com
svn merge -r N:M http://server/branch/foo/test/com src/test/java/com

Hope this helps to save you some time.

Answer 2

This sounds like a one-time problem. I suggest you could use svn diff > /to/some/file.patch (or normal diff) to save his changes to a file, then apply it on your moved trunk with patch -p0 < /to/some/file.path.

Answer 3

Anyone tried this software? xMerge

This is plugin to SmartSVN but looks like it do the trick. If anyone is using it I will be grateful if send me review of it.

Answer 4

I just had the same problem and I solved it with git. I didn't want to merge serveral modules with svn merge -r N:M http://server/branch/foo/test/com src/test/java/com for src/main, src/test and resources.

So I used git svn clone file:///some/repo -T trunk -b branches -t tags. Like this I was able to keep git master in sync with svn trunk and merge it with my git branch. When I was done, I merged the git branch to git master and from there to svn trunk.