Using temporary branches and mergeinfo properties

Currently we have some developers in our company that work some days at home. The other days they will work on site. The day before the developer will work at home he will create a branch of his WC of the trunk/branch he is currently working on.  The next day he will checkout this temporary branch at his home computer and start working on it and commit his changes to this temporary branch. When he’s back at the office the next day he will merge those changes back to the trunk/branch that he was working on and delete the temporary branch. This process will repeat itself each time.

After upgrading to subversion 1.6.5  (we previously used subversion 1.4.2) we started to have some problems with the merge. After merging the files from the temporary branch to the local WC of the branch, a lot of files will get notices as changed files even when the file hasn’t changed but only because merge properties have been added.  This very annoying when doing a large commit as it will also contain a lot of unchanged files that we revert by hand each time.

I understand that it can be useful sometimes keeping this merge information when merging revisions from/to some branches, but because we just use temporary branches, this information will be unnecessary to keep. And won’t the mergeinfo keep growing this way as it gets committed to the trunk/branch each time?

What can/should we do to make this scenario work?

Thanks for your help.

Igor Markovic

I think the best way is to only merge the entire tree at the root of the branch, ie. Instead of merging a file, then another file. Merge the entire thing in 1 go.

That way you only get mergeinfo on the root directory, no sub-merge. Incidentally, I thought you only got mergeinfo on directories, not files, so if you are seeing files that have ‘changed’ when they haven’t, perhaps you’re seeing whitespace changes instead of property changes.