Merging a branch back into the trunk with Subversion

Submitted by shane on Tue, 2009-03-24 11:49

I'm just getting the hang of using Subversion for version control and the workflow is starting to gel. One issue I came against yesterday was merging a branch back into the trunk. The process is a bit interesting.

  1. Copy your trunk to a branch svn copy <a href="http://path.com/to/trunk" title="http://path.com/to/trunk">http://path.com/to/trunk</a>  http://path.com/to/branch/example
  2. Switch your working copy to the branch
  3. Check your URL with svn info
  4. Make changes to code
  5. Commit back to branch svn ci -m "made my changes to branch example"
  6. Switch your working copy back to TRUNK
  7. Merge the branch with the trunk on your working copy svn merge <a href="http://path.com/to/trunk" title="http://path.com/to/trunk">http://path.com/to/trunk</a> <a href="http://path.com/to/branch/example" title="http://path.com/to/branch/example">http://path.com/to/branch/example</a> .
  8. This only changes the working copy, now you need to commit your working copy to trunk svn ci -m "Merged branch example into trunk"