Subversion: Multiple conflicts when merging the differences between two branches into an unmodified working copy

Question

I have a Subversion repository full of WordPress sites. The repository structure looks something like this:

/WordPress/tags/2.9.2
/a-wordpress-site.com/trunk
/another-wordpress-site.com/trunk
...

When I want to create a new site, I simply copy /WordPress/tags/<latest-tag> to /<new-site>/trunk. It's been great! - except that now, for the first time since I created the repository, there's a new version of WordPress available: WordPress 3.0.

WordPress.org uses Subversion, and they provide read-only access to their repository. I'd like to incorporate the differences between 2.9.2 and 3.0 into my repository. Unless I'm mistaken, I should be able to accomplish this using TortoiseSVN's "Merge two different trees" function.

... But when I specify http://core.svn.wordpress.org/tags/2.9.2 as the From URL, and http://core.svn.wordpress.org/tags/3.0 as the To URL, and merge the differences into my repository's /WordPress/trunk directory (trunk = 2.9.2), I get several tree conflicts, and at least one normal conflict.

I don't mind resolving the conflicts by hand, but I'm not sure how to. Subversion is telling me that changes have been made to files that have been deleted. The normal conflict is especially baffling. How can this be? Have I done something wrong?

Answer 1

Assuming you didn't change anything on the WordPress code that you checked out, ie the one contained in your directory /WordPress/tags/2.9.2, then there is no problem to just checkout the Wordpress 3.0 code from their SVN repo. You don't need to merge stuff by yourself.

Answer 2

Dont take me wrong :) but for understanding svn merges the multitude of GUI tools arround make it more complicated than it has to be.

all your wordpress-instances you use for projects are ancestors of the "current" wordpress you have. Only that "current" is your /tags/2.9.2

In a better vendor-brannch scenario you would base your projects of a general "/vendor/wordpress/current"

maybe read http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3754459/subversion-svnexternals-file-override/3785904#3785904

But its allright you can still overwrite tags/2.9.2 in your repository with the code of the new wordpress 3.0

After that you have to merge inside every of your projects. I'd use the commandline client:

svn merge http://svnserver.tld/repository/tags/2.9.2