How do I find out if a Branch was merged into the Trunk?

Question

I'm trying to clear up an svn tree. There's a trunk directory and a branches directory, containing a folder with the hopeless name "main-branch". I want to find out if it was already merged into the trunk.

How can I do this? Is svn mergeinfo reliable, because it shows nothing?

Answer 1

The mergeinfo in Subversion is reliable, as long as the people working with Subversion are reliable. These are the things that could go wrong:

• If you have worked with Subversion before 1.5, there is no mergeinfo. So that information is lost then.
• If the people that have done the merge have done it on the wrong directory, the mergeinfo will be located somewhere else. You could check all directories where a merge could be possibly been done.
• Because mergeinfo is just a Subversion property, you are free to change that (and of course commit it then). This is not reasonable, because there you need additional actions, and the people that have done that would remember it.

See the documentation to mergeinfo; there are some options how to find the information you want to see. The most reasonable setting is that the merge was done by hand (by a real person, not by Subversion), and that there is no mergeinfo available.