As a developer, I’m pretty accustomed to getting error messages. I think the number of errors I’ve seen is probably greater than the number of lines of code I’ve written. I definitely have seen the same error 20 times in a row as I try to debug a single line of code. So is the life of a developer. Anyways, this fun error message was seen when I was trying to merge a branch into trunk after a release with the following command:
svn merge --reintegrate
I guess I should also mention that the weekend before this happened, I had just updated my Macbook Pro from Lion to Mavericks. A little research revealed that this was due to the upgrade and my version of SVN being updated to version 1.7. So the proposed solutions were mainly around updating my branch and removing the mergeinfo property files in each folder. This wasn’t a great idea and seemed really manual. So after more research, I found that it would be easier to just do a manual merge:
// from the destination where you want to merge changes into
svn merge -r N:M SOURCEN and M are the start (N) and end (M) revision numbers you want to merge into your destination project. And SOURCE is the url to the project you want to merge changes from. So, in my original example of merging changes from a release branch into trunk, I would run the following command from my trunk directory:
svn merge -r 1:100 http://svn/project/trunk
Hope this helps someone.