How to avoid tree conflicts when merging branches that were moved?

Question

I have a repository that looks like this:

/a/trunk/Library
/a/branches/FeatureX/Library
/b/trunk/Application
/b/branches/FeatureX/Application

I want to rearrange this so that I have the Application and Library folders next to each other:

/a/trunk/Library
/a/trunk/Application
/a/branches/FeatureX/Library
/a/branches/FeatureX/Application

I tried to achieve this by simply "svn copy"-ing the "Application" folders. The problem I'm facing is that when I try to merge "FeatureX" into "trunk" later on, I get a tree conflict because "Application" was added in both trunk and the branch.

Is there a better way to do this?

(BTW i cannot merge "FeatureX" before copying "Application", this is just a test to see if it will be possible later on...)

Answer 1

OPTION 1: Merge the changes from trunk (aka /b/trunk/Application) to your /a/branches/FeatureX. That should you give you an 'original' Application folder in the FeatureX branch. Then do a delta merge taking /b/trunk/Application and /b/branches/FeatureX/Application and merging those changes to a working copy of /a/branches/FeatureX/Application. That should allow you to then cleanly merge /a/branches/FeatureX to /a/trunk.

OPTION 2: Don't svn copy /b/trunk/Application to /a/trunk. Rather svn copy /b/branches/FeatureX/Application to /a/branches/FeatureX. Then merge those changes to /a/trunk when you are ready. If there are changes in /b/trunk/Application that are not in /b/branches/FeatureX/Application, you'll want to re-base that branch before doing the svn copy over to /a/branches/FeatureX.