svn: How to undo a merge (without commit)?

Question

I just did an svn merge to merge changes from the trunk to a branch:

$ svn merge -r328:HEAD file:///home/user/svn/repos/proj/trunk .
--- Merging r388 through r500 into '.':
A    foo
A    bar
   C baz1
   C baz2
U    duh
[...]

But there were too many conflicts, so I'd like to undo that.

One way to do that is to commit and then merge back. But I can't commit because of the conflicts. What's the best way to undo in that case?

Answer 1

As long as you haven't commited, you can always do a revert to undo all your changes.

Answer 2

Revert recursively from the top of your working copy:

svn revert -R .

You will need to manually delete the files that were added. As in after reverting, the files added will remain on disk but they will be in a non-tracked state ("? foo")

Answer 3

Just do svn resolve on all conflicts anyway and commit:

$ svn resolved baz1
$ svn resolved baz2
$ svn ci -m "oops. bad merge. will revert."
Transmitting file data ......
Committed revision 501.

Then, officially undo it by merging back to where it was:

$ svn merge -r501:500
--- Reverse-merging r319 into '.':
[...]

That's it, the merge has been undone in the directory. Now commit that too:

$ svn ci -m "bad merge has been undone"
Transmitting file data ......
Committed revision 502.

The advantage over the svn revert -R . method is that the files that were added are all properly removed.