How do I automatically svn merge when automated tests pass?

Question

After each commit into 'trunk', we automatically run a bunch of tests against trunk. When those tests pass, I'd like an automated merge into a branch called 'tests-passed'. When the tests fail, no merge should happen, but once the problem is fixed on 'trunk' at the next or a later commit, all the changes should be merged.

The point is to have a branch that has the same content as trunk, but that is just a tad more sane than 'trunk' because at least the automated tests have passed.

I have a script that tries to do that manually but it's a hack using custom properties that doesn't always work correctly -- as I just found out. How do I best make Subversion do this?

Answer 1

Run these commands at the root of a working copy of tests-passed whenever you have determined that a new trunk revision <somerev> has passed the tests:

svn update
svn merge http://example.com/svn/myproject/trunk -r 0:<somerev>
svn commit -m "merged trunk revisions up to <somerev> into tests-passed"

Whenever you use the merge command, SVN will record the merges in the svn:mergeinfo property. So the above command should automatically determine which revisions in the range 0:<somerev> are eligible for merging, excluding any merges that have already been done.

Like you said in a comment, conflicts are not expected. But sometimes I've seen unexpected conflicts occur anyway when merging a range of SVN revisions containing renames. To get rid of these conflicts, you can use the --accept theirs-full option with the merge command to always accept the trunk state.

Answer 2

You can use a Continuous Integration Tool for that. One pretty popular: Hudson

http://hudson-ci.org/

You can script that kind of behaviour there.