The woes of SourceForge.net and SVN
It's no secret, I use SourceForge.net to work on an open source project ObjectHelpDesk.net and most of the code, patterns and nick nacks that I write about come from that project. I also use TortoiseSVN coupled with VisualSVN to manage my source code. Recently, as part of the Generics, Interfaces, Providers and You series I choose to branch from the trunk and rewrite the projects provider model. When I was finished I attempted to merge them back together.
Recently, I updated Tortoise and VisualSVN so I now have version 1.5.1. SO I switched my working copy back to the trunk, and attempted to reintegrate a branch into the trunk.
"Retrieval of mergeinfo unsupported by 'https://objecthelpdeskn.svn.sourceforge.net/...'" errr what? So I did a little digging with my good friend Google. What I found was a whole bunch of people having the same basic issue. Turns out that SVN made a change around version 1.5 and added a mergeinfo command to make it so you do not have to remember what the last version you merged was so you do not double merge files by accident. Great idea, except...
SourceForge.net is not running the 1.5 SVN server. No problem, find the option to use an older merge method and away we go... So I searched, I looked, hunted and pondered. For the life of me I could not find an option to "reintegrate" the branch into the trunk. Back to Google for an answer.
I found one common suggestion, or fix, download an older client from before 1.5 and use that to do the merge.
Ok first, I hate downgrading. Second, I just got everything installed on a new development machine and I am not about to go mucking about uninstalling tortoise so I can reinstall an older version just to do a merge because Sourceforge.net does not have the latest version of a SVN server. So there had to be another option, one that seemed sane.
Let me explain, I refused to believe that the folks over at SourceForge.net would leave something like source control merges broken for any length of time. On the other hand It seemed that SVN/TortoiseSVN would not go as far as to break their software with a "hub" of the open source community like SourceForge.net. And there was another option right under my nose...
Merge two Different Tress. Really, that is all we are doing, the trunk and branch are two different tress. This merge method asks you which tree/revision you want to start with and which tree/revision you want to end up at and it makes in happen in your working copy. Run the merge, compile the code and commit the changes.
What surprised me was not the fix for the issue, but it was the number of posts about this message and people saying "Oh downgrade your client or upgrade the server" and that number of replies that said "thanks downgrading the client fixed it". In the case of many open source projects, we depend on free tools and systems, like SourceForge.net to host our projects and we have no control over what version of source control repository software they gave installed (However, I do thank them for giving us a choice of source control repositories and being there). I use VisualSVN heavily in Visual Studio and I cant just downgrade tortoise without affecting it and my development environment. So using this "manual" fix seems like the sane method to me.
So if you run into a problem merging with an unsupported mergeinfo message do not just downgrade your client, try merging the two trees instead of reintegrating the branch into the trunk.
