[asterisk-dev] Automerge changes... finally worked out (long)

[Kevin P. Fleming]

I finally figured out the source of the problems with automerging of 
developer branches from the trunk (this was not an issue with developer 
branches based on branches/1.2).

The core issue that the 'svnmerge-integrated' property was being used 
for two conflicting purposes: to track the branches/1.2 fixes that had 
been forward-ported into the trunk and also to track the trunk changes 
that had been merged into the developer branch. Obviously this cannot 
work :-)

To solve the problem, the branches/1.2 forward-porting properties on 
trunk are no longer using the standard svnmerge property names; they are 
now called 'branch-1.2-merged' and 'branch-1.2-blocked', and there are 
_no_ 'svnmerge-integrated' or 'svnmerge-blocked' properties on the 
trunk. This means that forward-porting patches from branches/1.2 
requires specifying the property names to svnmerge; see the 
branching/merging page on asterisk.org for an example.

All new developers branches made from trunk should work with automerging 
without any problem, but existing branches have an issue: the developer 
branch contains a property 'svnmerge-integrated', but the trunk does 
not, and running 'svnmerge merge' will try to update that property, 
resulting in a conflict. To resolve this issue, for each branch that you 
maintain, you will need to manually use svnmerge to bring it up-to-date 
to at least revision 9163 (where the property was removed from the 
trunk); from that point forward, automerge will be able to manage the 
merges for you.

In the meantime, you will probably start to receive conflict notices 
because your branches cannot be merged... but once we are past this 
issue, automerging should work well and should no longer generate 
'false' conflicts like it was doing before.