How do I properly branch post-commit and revert the trunk in svn?

Question

I have some commits that I've decided, after the fact, are going to be more branch work then trunk work. How do I create the branch and revert the trunk while still ensuring merging isn't painful later?

Is it as simple as copying the current trunk to a branch and reverting the trunk? Or will this create headaches later?

Answer 1

I think Philips method would be something like the following, assuming the last "good" revision was at 100 and you are now at 130, to create the new branch:

svn copy -r100 svn://repos/trunk svn://repos/branches/newbranch
svn merge -r 100:130 svn://repos/trunk svn://repos/branches/newbranch

Note the idea is to preserve the changes made in those revisions so you can apply them back to trunk.

To revert trunk:

svn merge -r130:100 .
svn ci -m 'reverting to r100 (undoing changes in r100-130)' . 

(It wouldn't matter which order you performed these in, so you could revert trunk before creating the branch.)

Then you could switch to the new branch you created in the repo:

svn switch svn://repos/branches/newbranch workdir