Do comments on branch commits get persisted when the branch is merged onto the trunk?

Question

Using subversion v1.6.6 and TortoiseSVN v1.6.6..

After having created a branch and meticuously adding detailed comments whenever doing a commit on the branch, I can't seem to find those comments after I have merged the branch back onto the trunk.

Note : We're employing a feature branching strategy where all development is done in new branches and the Trunk is the 'master code base' that releases are created from (after integration testing).

So do I loose the old branch comments? If not, where are they? Where are they visible in Tortoise SVn.

Cheers in advance!

-- Lee

Answer 1

Independently of Tortoise SVN, the SVN commits made on a branch can only be viewed by executing an svn log on the branch itself. The commit comments are not actually merged to the target branch (trunk in your case) when merging.

Typically, you would make commits (with appropriate comments) on your branch and then merge those changes to the trunk. The commit message for the merge to the trunk should ideally describe exactly what you are merging (for example the feature name and the range of revisions merged).

Also note that as of Subversion 1.5, the revisions that have been merged are automatically tracked on the server. This is called Merge Tracking (see the SVN 1.5 Release Notes for details).