Hi, I am relatively new to svn and had some questions about maintaining branches and merging them back to the trunk.
The way my env is set up right now, ongoing development is done on the trunk. We have branches corresponding to various releases along the way. When needing to make a fix to an existing version, we've been pretty bad about making the change on the trunk instead of on the corresponding branch. We've in effect been treating the branches as snapshots at the time of release only. This kind of defeats one purpose of having the branches so we want to do it right. I read the chapters at http://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.5/svn.branchmerge.basicmerging.html and http://tortoisesvn.net/docs/release/TortoiseSVN_en/tsvn-dug-merge.html and want to see if I understand it properly. If I have a branch of the latest release version, it seems that I cannot use the normal svn merge to bring the change back into the trunk. As I understand it, svn merge is for merging things into *branches*. To merge things back into the trunk you would use the merge reintegrate option, but the branch should not be used for future work thereafter. So how can I periodically merge small fixes for the latest release back into the development trunk? I understand the use case of creating a branch for work on a specific feature, keeping it up to date with normal dev changes as work on the feature progresses, and finally udpating the trunk and ending the branch. The workflow as outlined in the book fits that to a T, but it doesn't seem to work so well for needing to keep a branch around for a while and needing to do periodic merges to the trunk. -Ralf
