When is it appropriate to use the --ignore-ancestry option when merging in subversion

Question

I think I must be missing something fundamental in my understanding which is preventing me from getting my head around this.

In what situations would you want to use the --ignore-ancestry option when performing a merge? It is my understanding that using this option prevents the mergeinfo property from being updated on the target branch, but in what situations would you not want the mergeinfo to be recorded?

Answer 1

You would use --ignore-ancestry if you wanted to merge same file paths as same files regardless of whether SVN thinks that they are different because their version id suggests to it that they are different.

I've had experiences where a SVN would delete directories in my branch that were not in my merge source unless I used --ignore-ancestry.

This would mainly happen if you deleted and committed, then copied into your local branch as opposed to restoring the directory in the baseline and merging it to your branch.