How exactly to do a Subversion pre-1.5 style merge?

Question

I have to deal with Subversion 1.4 merges at the moment and have found this answer to a question, which exactly describes my problem. The actual question deals with git-style rebase and merge problems with SVN which produce tree conflicts. It includes the following recommendation:

[...] instead of range-merging the branch to a working copy that points to the trunk, you want to merge "FROM trunk@HEAD TO branch@HEAD" with the working copy pointing to trunk. In essence:

"Give me all the changes I'd need to make trunk identical to branch".

Now I wonder how to actually do that merge with SVN, since svn merge only merges to the working directory. Is there a typo in the original answer or am I missing something?

Answer 1

I'm not sure, but it seems to me you would need to merge the difference between branch head and trunk head into trunk, so that would be "FROM branch@HEAD TO trunk@HEAD", not the other way around.

There is a merge syntax where you merge the difference between two tags into your working copy. This would be the one to use. (Sorry for being so vague, but I had't done much SVN before 1.5.)

Answer 2

1. After svn merge you need to svn ci, and the merge is committed to the branch
2. With Subversion 1.4, the best way to handle merging is with svnmerge.py