Selective merging in subversion

Question

Does anyone know how to avoid merging certain files in a branch merge? For eg., if i am merging stuff from say mybranch to trunk but if i DONT want to try merging certain files, is there a way to set something to ignore looking at these files?

The files i need ignore may or may not share file extensions.This scenario is important in stiautions where i want to handle certain files by hand, sicne I am sure they will conflict. The conflict will prevent the merge from proceeding on the remaining files - they are large in number and i'd like to get them all merged automatically while i deal with the conflicting one's by hand.

Thanks in advance!

( I did look at other related queries here in SO but didnt find one that suits the situation i have at hand)

EDIT: Is there is a way to avoid certain files from being looked into - rather than have them sit in my merge workspace in a conflicted state post merge - and thereby preventing recursive commits on the other files.

Answer 1

There's an option to let SVN continue a merge even though conflicts arose and resolve them later.

Edit: You could mark those files as "already merged". This will modify the properties so that SVN assumes that they have already been merged and prevent it from merging those fixes again. This will, however, make it a lot harder to merge them later.

Answer 2

I don't think there is a direct way to accomplish what you want.

Depending on whether the "merge list" is longer or shorter than the "no-merge list", I would try one of these two approaches:

1. Do a merge explicitly listing all the files you positively want to merge.

2. Do a full merge, let conflicts appear and then 'svn revert' all files you didn't wan't to merge. You should end with a working copy with many merged files, and some unmerged ones.

Just a suggestion.