Problem reintegrating a branch into the trunk in Subversion 1.5

Question

I'm trying to reintegrate a development branch into the trunk in my Subversion 1.5 repository. I merged all the changes from the trunk to the development branch prior to this operation. Now when I try to reintegrate the changes from the branch I get the following error message:

Command: Reintegrate merge https://dev/svn/branches/devel into C:\trunk  
Error: Reintegrate can only be used if revisions 280 through 325 were previously   
Error: merged from https://dev/svn/trunk to the reintegrate   
Error: source, but this is not the case:  
Error:   branches/devel/images/test  
Error:     Missing ranges: /trunk/images/test:280-324  
...

The message then goes on complaining about some folders in my project. But when I try to merge the changes from the trunk to the development branch again, TortoiseSVN tells me that there's nothing to merge (as I already merged all the changes before):

Command: Merging revisions 1-HEAD of https://dev/svn/trunk into C:\devel, respecting ancestry  
Completed: C:\devel  

I'm trying to follow the instructions from here: http://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.5/svn.branchmerge.basicmerging.html, but there's nothing about solving such a problem.

Any ideas? Perhaps I should just delete the trunk and then make a copy of my branch? But I'm not really sure if it's safe.

Answer 1

Juste a wild guess, but you did commit your merge on your branch ?

Answer 2

These links are good descriptions of reintegrating and might help:

Subversion merge reintegrate
Subversion 1.5 merge-tracking in a nutshell

Answer 3

You have to merge the revisions r280 to r324 from trunk into your branch first.

It seems you already merged r325 into your branch, however --reintegrate needs to get all revisions up to your latest revision merged. There must be no gap. So here a little Diag:

           +----------------------> /branches/devel
          /                    /   \<--merge not working!
 --------/-------+--+---+-----+---------> trunk
         |       \  |  /      |
        280       \ V /      325
                    V
                  missing sync merges from trunk to branch

I think this is your branch structure, so you need to sync all changes from trunk to your branch. You only merged r325, so just merge r280-r324 and after doing this you should be fine to use --reintegrate

Answer 4

I stopped getting these problems when I started using the -r option to svn merge command and did not attempt to do the --reintegrate until after I had merged without it. I'm using svn 1.6.1.

Here's what I do:
1. when merging from branch to trunk or trunk to branch, I use the -r option like this:

 cd branchWorkArea/topDir
 svn merge -r<branchPoint>:HEAD [otheroptions] svn://svn/project/trunk/topDir

1. when I have resolved any conflicts and test my code, I commit the merge to the branch and then merge the branch to the trunk using the same basic options (especially -rBranchPoint:HEAD)

2. when the trunk has been tested and committed, then I use the --reintegrate option to the close off the branch. Make sure you use the -rbranchPoint:HEAD option on it too.

For other options, I always use

--depth infinity (defaults to infinity in 1.6.2 but not before)
-x -b -x -w --ignore-eol-style

Maybe, I've just been lucky but things sure seem to work better.

To find the branch point for a branch, you do a svn log --stop-on-copy then look at the to very last revsion -- it will be the svn copy that created the branch.

To do this on linux, I do something like this:

svn log --stop-on-copy svn://svn/project/trunk/topDir |
grep '^r' | tail -1 | sed -e 's/^r//1'-e 's/ .*//g'

this should print the revision number of the branch point.

Good luck