How am I supposed to use the TortoiseSVN merge tool (TortoiseMerge)?

Question

How am I supposed to use merge with the latest version of Tortoise SVN? I'm an old ClearCase guy, and I've never understood it. When I merge a branch back into the trunk, I just select range of revisions and then leave the version numbers blank and it starts spitting out all kinds of files that it's merging. It basically looks like it's adding and modifying everything.

The funny thing is, when the merge is done, the only files that are actually touched are the files I updated, so it seems like everything worked fine (and after running a few tests, this seems to be the case). I just get scared by everything getting spit out of the merge log, it doesn't give me any indication of what's really happening.

Should I put something in the version number box? TortoiseSVN seems to indicate that won't be necessary.

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So it seems like what I missing is the fact that the "Range of Revisions" should not be blank. To get functionality similar to what I was used to, I needed to put in the revision that created the branch-HEAD. So if revision 289 created my branch, then I needed to put 289-HEAD in the revisions to merge field and the results would match what I expected.

Answer 1

TortoiseSVN contains two notions of "merge":

1. The TortoiseMerge tool, which is the graphical diffing tool that comes with TortoiseSVN
2. Merging, as in "branching and merging", which is a Subversion concept (which is what you appear to be referring to)

The latter is a classic source code control concept that differs between products. I know nothing about ClearCase, so I can't really attempt any conversion explanation, but I can point you in the direction of the Subversion book, which is an excellent guide, and which contains a really good explanation of how branching and merging work in the Subversion world.