On Tue, Aug 24, 2010 at 08:59:32AM +0100, Julian Foad wrote: > On Tue, 2010-08-24, Stefan Sperling wrote: > > On Mon, Aug 23, 2010 at 06:40:39PM +0100, Julian Foad wrote: > > > You seem to be talking only about the case where the (locally added) > > > target is the root of the whole merge, and saying that lack of ancestral > > > relationship between the source node and this target node doesn't > > > matter. Maybe the user performing the merge is fully aware of what > > > he/she is doing, which is fine in this simple case. But what about the > > > general case, where the modification to a locally added node may be > > > somewhere deep down in a merge that's supposed to be a simple automatic > > > merge? > > > > I don't think locally added nodes somewhere deep within the merge target > > are affected by this change. Those should be handled by the regular > > tree conflict logic. The change only affects the merge target root, > > which can now be a locally added file or directory. Previously, > > Subversion just errored out on locally added merge target roots > > and didn't merge anything at all. > > Oh, OK! That makes sense then.
I've thought about this a bit more, and am now convinced that there is in fact a use case where your policy distinction makes sense. :) If users do automatic merges, those merges can be pretty complex and could contain several merge steps. At each step, the merge command would be run to merge a change into a root below some logical "merge master root". So each individual merge is run with a different root. In this case, users might expect a merge into a locally added node somewhere below the master root to raise a tree conflict, because they may not be able to tell in advance whether a series of merges will end up using an added node as merge target. But this is a very narrow use case, and Subversion behaves far worse in other tree conflict situations (e.g. deleted directory vs. deleted directory is still not recognised). And I would suggest to people who run into this situation and expect a tree conflict to review their branching/merging patterns and simplify them to avoid this situation. Stefan
