Reintegrating branch made from working directory.

Question

I have just done something without thinking it through. I have made a branch from working directory containing local modifications using TortoisSVN. I am assuming it did a copy and switch in one shot. Now the first version of my new branch is different from any version of the trunk. The question is, how do I reintegrate this branch back into the trunk? If I use the delta between the first and the last versions of the branch, that changeset will not contain the initial modifications that I had in my working directory.

If I had made a branch from the latest version of the trunk, and then committed my local changes, this would not have been a problem, because the first version of the branch would have been identical to the corresponding version of the trunk.

Answer 1

I suppose I can find the version of the trunk, just before I made the branch and use that as the starting point of the changeset. Seems awkward though. Is there a more elegant solution?

Edit: yes there is a more elegant solution. I was wrong. A branch, even a branch created from the working directory retains all the history of the trunk prior to the split. I am using TortoisSVN, so all I had to do was uncheck "Stop on copy/rename" in the log window to see the versions prior to the split. Then I simply used the version immediately before the creation of the branch as the start of my change set. There was no problem after all.

Answer 2

This should help you.

I'm calling your new branch invalid to shorten things up a bit.

1. Make a diff between invalid branch and trunk (use the revision just before creating new invalid branch - let's call this one invalid) - that will give you changes from your working copy that you commited when creating invalid branch and are not part of a trunk.
2. Apply those changes to trunk.
3. Reintegrate your invalid branch with trunk (initial changes are already there - step 2)