I'm pretty used to how to do CVS merges in Eclipse, and I'm otherwise happy with the way that both Subclipse and Subversive work with the SVN repository, but I'm not quite sure how to do merges properly.
When I do a merge, it seems to want to stick the merged files in a seperate directory in my project rather than overwriting the old files that are to be replaced in the merge, as I am used to in CVS.
The question is not particular to either Subclipse or Subversive.
Thanks for the help!
I typically check out both branches and then use the compare to each other option which does a synchronize-like compare of the two source trees. After integrating the changes into one branch, you can recommit back to the repository.
I would advise not trying to use Eclipse's plugins as your primary access to Subversion.
If you are developing on Windows, TortoiseSVN is the best program that I have seen for Subversion access. Explore to the directory of which you wish to merge, right click on it and use the Tortoise SVN merge option. Assuming a non-interactive merge, once you get conflicts, you'll have to go through each conflicted file and edit the conflicts before marking them as resolved. For this process I recommend a program called KDiff3, which shows your local repository copy (what was stored in the .svn before the merge), your local copy (including any changes), and the copy coming from the repository, and allows you to easily see (and even hand-modify if needed) the result of the merging. It also handles a bunch of minor conflicts automatically.
KDiff3 is portable, TortoiseSVN is a windows shell extension, so if you're using another environment, I would try to just use SVN to merge. But that would be much more of a pain :)
Use Eclipse integration, it works perfectly fine.
The main change from CVS, is that you only merge deltas from a branch, ie changes from one revision to another. That is to say you have to track the correct start revision somehow (unless you have svn 1.5 merge history)
If you got that right, it's only up to you to get the changes right with the compare editor.
Remember that with svn reverting a modified tree to a clean state is fairly easy. Simply have a clean workspace on the merge destination branch and run the merge command to import the modifications from the merge source branch, then synchronize your workspace and you will get your usual eclipse comparison window showing all the merge modified files and the conflicts.
If for some reason you can't solve the conflicts you can svn revert on the project and go back to a clean state, otherwise you do the merge in place and once you are done you can commit. Note that you don't have to commit, once you are done handling the conflicts you can also return to the dev view, verify that the code compiles, run your unit tests, whatever and then synchronize again and commit (once the conflict are locally resolved they won't come back)
last time I looked, when you use subclipse merge command it will overwrite the merged file (using conflict markers to show conflicting areas) and put the original left and right side of the merge in the same place. it shouldn't put anything in different directories.
As a rule of thumb, it is best to commit all merge modifications in a single commit and to only have the merge modifications in the commit so that you can rollback the merge later if needed.
Merging an entire branch into trunk
Inspect the Branch project history to determine the version from which the branch was taken
So now I know that 82517 was the first version ID of the branch history. So all versions of the branch past 82517 have changes that I want to merge into trunk
Now go to the "trunk" project in your Eclipse workspace and select "right click - Team - Merge"
The default view is the 1 url merge
This will take you to the "Team Synchronizing" perspective (if it doesn't you should go there yourself) in order to resolve conflicts (see below)
Re-Merging more branch changes into trunk
Insepct the trunk project history to determine the last time you merged into trunk (you should have commented this)
So now I know that any version greater than 82517 in the branch needs to be merged into trunk
Now go to the "trunk" project in your Eclipse workspace and select "right click - Team - Merge"
The default view is the 1 url merge
This will take you to the "Team Synchronizing" perspective (if it doesn't you should go there yourself) in order to resolve conflicts (see below)
Resolving Conflicts
You should be at the "Team Synchronizing" perspective. This will look like any regular synchronization for commit purposes where you see files that are new and files that have conflicts.
For every file where you see a conflict choose "right click - Edit Conflicts" (do not double click the file, it will bring up the commit diff version tool, this is VERY different)
once you have resolved all the conflicts in that file, tell the file to "mark as merged"
once all the files are free of conflicts you can then synchronize your Eclipse project and commit the files to SVN
openCollabNet's merge tool for subclipse is pretty neat. There are many merging types available and the merging I just performed with it when seamlessly. I recommend it.
The one thing that syncrhonize view in eclipse lacks is check-in capability. In Team synchronization view I can view all my changes and resolve conflicts, so it would be rather intuitive to check-in right there instead of going back to java view and do check-in.