Merge trunk to branch in Subversion

I'm using Subversion 1.4.6, and I cannot upgrade to version 1.5 right now.

The situation:

  1. The trunk has a lot of structural changes (i.e. moving files around, mostly).

  2. I have a branch that was recently merged from the trunk, but before the major changes.

What is the best way to merge the trunk to the branch?

What I had in mind:

  1. First carefully merge the branch to the trunk, by merging only the modified files in the branch to the trunk.

  2. Copy the trunk to the branch. What is the best way to do this without losing the branch history? Should I deprecate the branch and create a new one?


Okay, it looks like I didn't given SVN enough credit. It's smart enough after all. I was just put off by the output of "D" and "A", but in the background it did a move.

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Is there something that prevents you from merging all revisions on trunk since the last merge?

svn merge -rLastRevisionMergedFromTrunkToBranch:HEAD url/of/trunk path/to/branch/wc

should work just fine. At least if you want to merge all changes on trunk to your branch.

Last revision merged from trunk to branch can be found by running this command inside the working copy directory:

svn log -v --stop-on-copy

It is “old-fashioned” way to specify ranges of revisions you wish to merge. With 1.5+ you can use:

svn merge HEAD url/of/trunk path/to/branch/wc

Alternatively in 1.6+ there is no need for "HEAD", so you can use:

svn merge url/of/trunk path/to/branch/wc