How do I “merge forward” in svn?

Question

For instance, suppose I have a branch that I want to update with the new stuff in trunk. I've always just merged trunk into the new branch, but I came across a somewhat different process that Divmod uses. Does divmod have some kind of special requirement to do branching like this, or have I been doing it wrong all along?

Answer 1

The way you're currently doing it is the way the Subversion Book suggests.

It appears that Divmod does things this way because of the pre-1.5 merge syntax:

As one example of such a problem, in SVN one must always pass the revision where the branch was created on trunk as an argument to the merge command, and determining that number involves reading the output of another long-running command. Some branches cannot be merged in this manner, depending on where the branch was originally created from.

(Source)

This is no longer true.

Answer 2

The way you are doing it is the usual way it's done, so you haven't been doing it wrong all along.

However...

There are some cases in which Subversion will get itself entirely confused and take a very long time to complete the merge. The Divmod method avoids those cases.