Reintegrate a branch back into the trunk—assuming that you have an up-to-date working copy of the trunk (the -verbose option prints additional information regarding what the merge is doing prior to actually applying any diff; useful in very large which might take a significant amount of time to complete). A reintegrate merge also requires that the source branch is coherently synced with the target - in the above example, this means that all revisions between the branch point W and the last merged revision X are merged to the feature branch, so that there are no unmerged revisions in-between. This form is called a 'cherry-pick' merge. Reintegrate a Branch There are some conditions which apply to a reintegrate merge: Firstly, the server must support merge tracking. The working copy must be of depth infinite (no sparse checkouts), and it must not have any local modifications, switched items.
Local branching is very easy with Git, but with Subversion (SVN) some magic is needed to manage complex local working directories. When working on more than one feature or bug within one SVN branch, the changes can quickly become hard to manage and keep separate. If the change ends up being in the same file as another feature’s change, a real problem occurs when trying to commit the code separately. There are options to make sure changes don’t encroach on each other, but none of them are as simple and lightweight as local branching with Git. Since SVN does not have the concept of a pull request, code reviews might be done pre-commit, forcing the developer to keep local changes in a working directory until the review is complete and changes can be committed. In this situation, the following solutions for managing multiple local changesets might come in handy.
Solutions for managing multiple changes in Subversion
Create a separate SVN branch
The first and best option would be to create another SVN branch in the centralized repository to work in. Then, when the work is complete svn merge --reintegrate into the main branch. This is the most manageable way to deal with multiple changes, but requires your team to allow any developer to create and manage their own branches separate from the trunk. This can be done by allowing developers to create and manage branches in a folder named after them, like /svn/branches/kevin, or in a branches folder related to what they are working on like /svn/branches/bugs or /svn/branches/features.
Copy an existing branch
If creating a new branch is a feasible option then one can be created with svn copy.
A branch can also be created from your working directory via
With TortoiseSVN, you can create a branch from a working directory via TortoiseSVN → Branch/Tag.., or you can copy another branch in your SVN repository from the Repository Browser by holding Ctrl while dragging a branch folder to a new location.
Those who already manage branches in SVN would obviously be aware of this, but developers that don’t have the responsibility of managing branching and merging would need to know this moving forward.
Merge & Reintegrate
When work is complete in the feature branch, merge any revisions that are not present in the feature branch from the trunk, then reintegrate back into the trunk.
This process can also be done easily with TortoiseSVN via Tortoise SVN → Merge → Reintegrate a branch. For more information on reintegrating branches, refer to the SVN Book.
If code reviews are done pre-commit, this solution would be a way to improve the code review process to act more like a Git pull request, by moving code reviews after the commit into the feature branch, but before the branch is reintegrated.
Reintegrate Branch Git
Copy/paste working directory
Copy/pasting a clean working directory to a new directory before working on a feature can be manageable, but is often too bulky of a process for large code bases.
Pros
- Don’t have to worry about creating “unnecessary” branches that you would probably delete or never look at again
- Having a clean working directory always at hand allows for quick merging, branching, reverting, etc. (you should always have a clean working copies of branches anyways)
Cons
- Paste action could take a long time
- Renaming folders to keep track of what you’re working on becomes a must and can be a pain when you have to kill all processes with handles in the directory to be renamed
- Doesn’t give you the kind of sandbox that creating a separate branch would
Use svn changelist
In a single working directory, files with local modifications can be grouped under different names by using SVN changelists. SVN changelists are ideal for simple features that will not end up having changes in the same file as another feature’s changes. To create a SVN changelist from a group of files use svn changelist.
This can also be done with TortoiseSVN via TortoiseSVN → Check for modifications, selecting the files you want to add to a changelist, and selecting Move to changelist → <new changelist>. At that point the files will be grouped under the new changelist’s name.
Manage multiple .patch files
This is not really a good option, but it is an option nonetheless.
When finished working on a feature in a working directory (or before switching focus to work on something else), create a .patch file containing all the current modifications and then revert the working directory. Then when you want to work on the feature contained in the .patch file, just create another .patch file with any modifications in the current directory, revert the working directory, and apply the .patch file so you can continue working on any changes.
Git & SVN in the same working directory
Running git init in any folder will create a local Git repository in that directory. This allows for easy management of local branches, and if you are new to Git or are looking to switch from SVN to Git at some point, this is a good way to get your feet wet. Some might view this as more work than it’s worth, but if you are up for it, the following is my workflow when managing a Git repository inside a SVN working directory.
Get Git
For Windows users I highly recommend downloading the full version the portable console emulator cmder which contains msysgit. Alternatively, you can download Git from git-scm.com/downloads.
If you are new to Git, here is a great guide to get you started.
Create a new Git repository
Start with a clean SVN working directory, then initialize and empty Git repo in the working directory.
Now you will see a .git folder alongside your .svn folder. Two source controls in one directory!
Create a branch
Create a branch for a feature you will work on and then checkout that branch.
The create and checkout can also be done with one command.
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You can commit you local changes in a Git branch as often as you want to keep track of your change history.
Then after working in that branch for a while, you might start working on another feature and end up with multiple branches. Though, at some point you will want to update from SVN.
Update SVN
Before updating from SVN, commit any changes to the current Git branch, then (1) checkout the master branch, (2) update from SVN, and (3) commit the updates to the master Git branch.
Push SVN update to Git branches
Reintegrate Branch To Trunk
At this point the updates from SVN are only in the master branch, and not in the feature1 branch, so we will need to rebase our feature1 branch to have a new base of master’s most recent commit. If you are unfamiliar with git rebase, there is a great visualization here.
You will then want to rebase all other Git branches to master as well, or else whenever you checkout a different Git branch SVN will show changes where it expected the files from the SVN update to have been changed.
If you are used to handling merge conflicts with TortoiseSVN, then you might want to use TortioseGit when rebasing as it can alleviate the stress of not knowing how to handle rebase conflicts via the Git bash.
Committing changes to SVN
After rebasing our feature branch we can safely merge our Git branch into master and then commit to the central SVN repository.
The feature1 Git branch can now be deleted since it is completed.
Other considerations
- Take the time to configure a
.gitignorefile so that any build artifacts will be ignored by Git. Common.gitignorefiles can be found here. - Consider adding any Git related items to the SVN repository’s ignore list, so that you do not accidentally commit them to SVN.
Drawbacks to using Git in an SVN directory
- Extra work
- Required knowledge of Git
- All Git branches must be rebased after an SVN update, so that pre-commit code reviews that require a later update would not show changes from the SVN update
More information on using Git & SVN together
- SubGit is a tool to help gently migrate from SVN to Git by creating a bidirectional Subversion to Git replication
- git-svn is a way to interface directly with a SVN repository via git (manual)
Svn Reintegrate A Branch
tl;dr
Reintegrate A Branch Block
Git’s cheap local branching is the easiest way to deal with multiple changes locally, but when SVN is the version control of choice, other methods like SVN branching, copy/pasting working directories, using svn changelist, using .patch files, and/or integrating a Git repository in a SVN working directory should be part of the workflow to correctly handle a complex working directory. Pre-commit code reviews can spoil a workflow when working in SVN without the option of creating a branch for each code reviewable changeset. Giving developers the option to create their own SVN branches is definitely worth it, even if only to remove the pain of having to deal with multiple changesets via the other options mentioned.
SVN-Reintegration Merge error: “must be ancestrally related” (6)
Using TortoiseSVN - when I use Test Merge, I get the error 'http://mysvnserver/svn/main/branches/ProjectA must be ancestrally related to http://mysvnserver/svn/main/trunk/ProjectB'
What can I do to resolve this?
As davebytes mentioned, this problem can occur when you branch trunkX into branchesY, but then move X into a new folder Z, i.e. trunkXZ.
If you just try to merge a change on branchesY into trunkX, you will get lots of conflicts; if you just try to merge branchesY into trunkXZ, you will get the 'ancestrally related' error.
But, the SVN manual describes the underlying problem: svn merge should really be called svn diff-and-apply. What you should instead be trying to describe in this scenario, is that you are trying to sum up the changes that occured from r100 to r200 of branchesY, and apply these changes to trunkXZ.
In TortoiseSVN, this is the merge two different trees scenario to your local working copy of trunkXZ, with r100 of branchesY set as 'from', and r200 of branchesY set as 'to'.