Hi,
we have migrated a SVN repository that heavily relies on the relatively new
merge tracking feature. By doing that we have been struggeling with two major
issues:
1. Svn move does not fix svn:mergeinfo property values
2. Svn merge operation does not realize that the code has been moved to a new
location
Issue 1.
In order to align the repository folder hierarchy to the pattern of a
multi-project repository layout we had to move the Java and COBOL sources from
folder /proj/import/.../0500_COBOL/appA (imported from a SVN dump) into
/proj/source/cobol/appA.
The appA folder was "SVN moved" by Drag&Drop in the Tortoise SVN Client Repo
Browser View to the new location. The users afterwards complained that the
Merge Tracking Feature was broken and that they could not see the still to be
merged changesets anymore.
After analyzing the issue we found that the merge-tracking property
"svn:mergeinfo" was still pointing to the initial import location.
After running a script that fixes the svn:mergeinfo property values by a set of
sed operations, the merge tracking view in the TortoiseSVN client was working
again.
Issue 2.
After one user merged a changeset, another user was complaining that he could
not see what the first user just merged. An analysis revealed that the value of
svn:mergeinfo, generated by the svn merge opertaion had again the old location
from where the changeset was coming from:
svn:mergeinfo= /proj/import/.../0500_COBOL/appA 12345
It seems as if the svn merge operation takes the svn:mergeinfo information from
the revision it is merging. Because the properties have been changed on the
HEAD only, the old revisions still contain the old paths.
That leads back to issue number 1 which has to be fixed by our sed script again.
The idea is now to run a script regularly which adapts the paths to the new
location, but with an hourly Cron script there is still the potential that the
users are running into trouble. The idea to let an SVN pre-commit hook fix the
properties seems to be dangerous when referring to the docs: "While hook
scripts can do almost anything, there is one dimension in which hook script
authors should show restraint: do not modify a commit transaction using hook
scripts...."
To me it seems as if the SVN merge tracking feature still has a few open ends
and that if your are relying on the feature, you can _never_ reorganize your
folder layout without breaking the merge tracking feature at least for the
revisions that have not yet been merged.
Regards,
Michael
