[SciPy-dev] The future of SciPy and its development infrastructure

[Jonathan Guyer]

On Feb 23, 2009, at 1:10 PM, David Cournapeau wrote:

> svn cp trunk -> branch
> svnmerge switch branch
> svnmerge init trunk
> svn ci -F svnmerge-commit.txt
> svn switch trunk
> svnmerge init branch
> svn ci -F svnmerge-commit.txt

Ahah.  The answer to that is, don't use svnmerge. I tried it after you  
told me about it on this list and it's a disaster, at least from our  
perspective. We have a protocol for merges <http://matforge.org/fipy/browser/trunk/documentation/ADMINISTRATA.txt 
 >, based directly on the guidance of the The SVN Book, and it works  
very well. I was prepared to concede to you that *merging* changes  
takes way too many steps, but you said "create a branch", which piqued  
my curiosity.

While svnmerge appeared to dramatically simplify all of the tagging  
and commenting that we presently have to do, in practice I found that  
it made a complete hash of things. I have no doubt that it could be  
used safely, but I don't believe that it actually saves any effort  
over doing it manually. As a case in point, seven steps for what  
should only be one.

> Ok, that's 7 :)

J'accuse!  8^)