TortoiseSVN lists files as modified, but they are identical

Question

I am merging a hot fix from our QA branch back into our Dev branch. Five files have changed. I do a fresh checkout of the Dev branch. I then do a merge (range of revisions) from QA into the Dev working copy. It brings in five files and there is a conflict on an external and ignore property -- which I resolve by "using local" (dev).

When I check modifications or commit, I expect to see the five files I merged as the only changes. However, I get close to 700 "modified" files showing up in the commit dialog. If I select one of these files and "Compare with base," WinMerge comes up and says the "files are identical."

I have tried this with the file dates set to "last committed" and not.

• Why are all of these files showing up as modified, when they are identical?
• What in the merge is causing this?
• How do I prevent SVN/TortoiseSVN from getting confused this way in the future?

Answer 1

Is WinMerge ignoring some whitespace differences?

Your IDE might be configured to replace some whitespace, maybe the newlines are different (\n -> \r\n) or tabs are being expanded to spaces or vice-versa.

Answer 2

I've seen this behaviour (or similar behaviour at least) following a merge. However, using TortoiseMerge I could see that whilst the file itself had not changed, there was a related mergeinfo value that had.

The answers posted to question might provide more insight:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/622409/tortoisesvn-using-svnmergeinfo-is-there-a-way-to-turn-it-off