Merging branch rev range into another branch

Question

I've got a branch (b) that was made from another branch (a), and I wanted to merge a range of revisions from branch a to branch b, but I get to the following message:

Merging revisions 1654-2691 of http://xyz/svn/inetpub/branches/DevBranch into C:\Branch, respecting ancestry
C:\Branch
...
C:\Branch
One or more conflicts were produced while merging r1777:1868 into
'C:\Branch' --
resolve all conflicts and rerun the merge to apply the remaining
unmerged revisions

Any idea what this is about?

Afaict I have multiple conflicts on the same file and I need to resolve step by step, but that sounds awfully painful to a git user. Is there something I am missing? or is there a easier way to do this merge?

Thanks,

Answer 1

svn merge command is sensitive to ancestry. This means when you are trying to merge any set of changes (from a branch, from trunk, from anything) the order is preserved and svn tries to merge changes one-by-one. This is mostly nice, you just simulate every little change occurs in branches, thus nothing is lost. Every time svn is stuck due to high number of conflicts it stops and asks you to resolve the conflicts before merge is resumed.

If two branches are isolated, are not merged (synchronized) often and are kept in this state for a long time (as in your case) this behavior is really painfull. You can just ignore the ancestry (versions between branching and HEAD) and do a simpler merge by using the flag --ignore-ancestry. This way merge determines the differences to be merged just as svn diff determines the differences between two versions, without considering ancestry.

Note that you should examine your merged working copy and be sure that everything is as you want them to be, since ignoring ancestry also ignores some of the changes made on the way, but did not make to latest version.