[asterisk-dev] Handling backport from trunk to 1.4 using svnmerge

[Michiel van Baak]

Hi all,

Today I finished updating our repotools/svnmerge to the latest upstream
version. (from subversion.tigris.org)

One of the new functions they put into svnmerge is the --record-only
option for the merge command.
This option allows for a commit from the source-branch to be recorded
only, and not applied to the destination-branch.
In the asterisk world, this touches the way we handle backports of fixes
from trunk to 1.4

Previously, a backport was handled like this:
- You fix an issue and commit the fix to trunk
- on IRC or the mailinglist devs request the fix to go into 1.4 as wel
- You backport the fix to 1.4 and commit it
- You block that specific commit in trunk using the block4trunk command

With the new version of svnmerge, and the change to mergetool that
Corydon made today this is how you should do it today:
- You fix an issue and commit the fix to trunk
- on IRC or the mailinglist devs request the fix to go into 1.4 as wel
- You backport the fix to 1.4 and commit it
- You record this commit as 'already here' in trunk using:
  record4trunk <revision of the fix in 1.4>

So, what does it do?
Instead of doing a real merge, it will only update the branch-1.4-merged
property and create a commit message file in ../merge.msg
If you commit this as every other merge with 'svn commit -F
../merge.msg' it will prevent this revision to show up in 'avail4trunk'
and friends.

I think this is a better way to handle backports then the block stuff we
did before.
The subversion team introduced this parameter specially for backports,
so they agree with me ;)

If you have remarks or questions feel free to ask them.

Thank you for your time.

-- 

Michiel van Baak
michiel at vanbaak.eu
http://michiel.vanbaak.eu
GnuPG key: http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0x71C946BD

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