Merge a Branch into Trunk

Question

I'm facing a peculiar problem with SVN merge. I want to merge from a dev branch to trunk. We have multiple dev branches cut off the trunk at the same time.

I'm merging one of those branches to trunk with this command:

svn merge trunk branch_1

I see changes that are not part of this branch, getting merged into trunk. What am I doing wrong ?

SVN Version :

Subversion command-line client, version 1.6.16-SlikSvn-tag-1.6.16@1076804-WIN32.

Answer 1

Your svn merge syntax is wrong.

You want to checkout a working copy of trunk and then use the svn merge --reintegrate option:

$ pwd
/home/user/project-trunk

$ svn update  # (make sure the working copy is up to date)
At revision <N>.

$ svn merge --reintegrate ^/project/branches/branch_1
--- Merging differences between repository URLs into '.':
U    foo.c
U    bar.c
 U   .

$ # build, test, verify, ...

$ svn commit -m "Merge branch_1 back into trunk!"
Sending        .
Sending        foo.c
Sending        bar.c
Transmitting file data ..
Committed revision <N+1>.

See the SVN book chapter on merging for more details.

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Note that at the time it was written, this was the right answer (and was accepted), but things have moved on. See the answer of topek, and http://subversion.apache.org/docs/release-notes/1.8.html#auto-reintegrate