Is it possible to Merge trunk and branch without pulling the source using Tortoise SVN?

Question

I have recent source in branch containing some features. I want to merge them to the trunk source.

1) I cannot pull the source locally. Because, I have to merge nearly for 30+ sources in different different locations.
2) I cannot delete the trunk source location and move the branch sources using the Copy To option.

So, I just want to merge sources by providing the Source and Target locations alone without pulling the source locally. Or Is there any automated way available?

I saw lot of post in SO related to this. None of them address, the context what I'm looking for.

Answer 1

I don't think this is possible, but that's a good thing. Do you really want a mindless, automated merge of all these sources (finished with a commit)? The point of merging in a local copy is so you can sanity check it all, and resolve all the conflicts you'll get if you have changes in the same place in multiple branches....

Answer 2

As pointed out in this tortoise svn article

... merging always takes place within a working copy.

You might use svn merge --accept theirs-full URL1 URL2 WCPATH in order to resolve all conflicts with the version from a given URL.

Sources deleted with svn delete will still be part of the history.

Answer 3

No, what you're asking is not possible. Merging takes place in your working copy. There are several reasons why this it is a good idea to keep it this way:

• Conflicts may appear and must be dealt with.
• Users usually build and test before committing new code, and should do so after merging as well.
• If the merge fails or if you do something stupid, you haven't messed up anything until you actually commit.

If you have to merge 30+ sources, you're best choice is to automate things using the command line client. This is how I would do it (in bash, you'll have to translate it to .bat or whatever you're comfortable with):

REPOS= \
    http://... \
    http://...

for f in REPO; do
    svn co REPO/target      
    svn merge REPO/source target
    svn commit -m "Merged target into source" target
    rm -r target
done

Tips:

• Use svn help <command> to see how to invoke each of the svn commands.
• Use svn merge --dry-run without svn commit first, to make sure you can do the merge without any conflicts (svn commit will fail unless you resolve the conflicts first).