joe shaw

I just ran into a (fixed) Subversion bug when trying to merge changes onto a branch. If you run into similar problems, upgrade your svn to at least 1.4.

On the trunk, there was a ChangeLog file. That file was moved to ChangeLog.cvs, and a new ChangeLog file was created and committed to the trunk. This scenario is the cause of the bug.

The first thing I did was merge the changes from the trunk into my branch:

$ svn merge -r3160:HEAD svn+ssh://joeshaw@svn.gnome.org/svn/beagle/trunk/beagle

I fixed the few conflicts, and went to commit:

$ svn commit
Deleting       .cvsignore
Deleting       BeagleClient/.cvsignore
[...]
Transmitting file data ................svn: Commit failed (details follow):
svn: Out of date: '/branches/beagle-unified-indexes-branch/ChangeLog' in transaction '3192-1'

svn was confused because it looked like the replaced ChangeLog file that was merged in was older than the one already in the repository. Looking through the Subversion book, the right thing to do when you see this message is to run svn update. But that yielded an error too:

$ svn update
svn: Working copy path 'ChangeLog' does not exist in repository

After a little more digging I came across this mailing list post and this bug, pointing to a fix in 1.4.0. SLED ships 1.3.0, but openSUSE 10.2 ships 1.4.0, and when I did it on my openSUSE-powered laptop, everything worked fine. So if you see similar issues when doing branch merges, you know you need to update your svn. You can install updated subversion packages from the openSUSE build service subversion repo.