spurious "property" modifications when reverting changes in tortoise svn

Question

Whenever I use the "revert changes from this revision" function in Tortoise SVN, then do "Check for Modifications", I end up seeing a bunch of irrelevant "Property" modifications to files that have nothing to do with the revision I'm reverting (in addition to the relevant "Text" modifications that I do care about).

Why is this happening? If I want to check in the reverted version, should I also check in the files with just the "Property" modifications or should I revert those? Is there any way to prevent this behavior?

Answer 1

That's the svn:mergeinfo property that gets set on those files and folders. Here's a blog post explaining why they're there.

You can revert those property changes if you like, but if you do then subsequent merges will be a lot slower since svn will have to contact the repository a lot more.

The number of mergeinfo properties set on (seemingly) unrelated files has been reduced a lot in svn 1.6.x, but you'd also have to update your server. It will be reduced even more in svn 1.7.x, but that's not expected soon.