svn branch to branch merge

Question

I have a question about when to use --reintegrate. We created a branch called Beta1 that we are using as a temp trunk for now while we try some new changes. Each developer then has a branch that they are making changes in. As necessary we are merging back to Beta1 to test our changes. Should we be using --reintegrate when we merge from the developer branch to Beta1 or just when we finally do Beta1 to trunk?

Answer 1

When you merge Beta1 to trunk.

The tortoise svn documentation is the 'best' (I use 'best' advisedly) explanation I could find. If you have a branch that has been kept up to date with changes made on trunk, reintegrate is used to merge the branch back to trunk; it does some additional checks to ensure that the branch contains any changes made to trunk since its creation.

In your example, this would mean that if Beta1 contains any changes made to trunk since they diverged, --reintegrate will instruct subversion that it's only merging changes that NEW to the Beta1 branch.