svn merge question

Question

All,

I am merging two different trees and I am getting a ton of conflicts. tree one has

src
|_file1 
|_file2

second tree has
src
|_file4
|_file5

I get tree conflicts, the directory contents are all different. So how do you resolve this conflict?

Answer 1

Perhaps you are not using svn merge as it is intended to be used. svn merge is used to merge branches created in svn and not two arbitrary trees.

If this is not the case, you could edit the question with more details and someone can help.

Answer 2

Well, that depends on what you want. The whole point of conflicts is to tell you that svn cannot automatically merge and that you have to decide what to do. See here for a guide how to do this.

EDIT :

Svn merge is usually used to merge two branches (or a branch and the trunk), reverting to a previous version of a branch (trunk) by merging with that previous version or undeleting files.

However, the only thing merge does is calculate the diff between two trees and apply that diff. Nothing stops you from merging two totally different file trees but you would have a ton of conflicts. Now, if your aim is for example to copy half of the files of tree 1 into tree 2 and merge the code of handful of files then merge is the way to go.

If, however, you need to merge the code of a ton files with conflicts then I don't think merge is what you need. If the differences are that massive simply copying over the code differences between two trees is not a good idea. You would need a very good understanding of both the code in tree 1 and tree 2 to be able to safely do this. But if you understand them both, it's usually easier to just copy and refactor the functionality you want by hand from tree 1 into tree 2.

Answer 3

load_dirs.pl is the suggested approach, in the red-bean book. And it does work.