Make branch merging options more useful
When you want to start merging you have to select one of three options:
- Port fix
- Merge feature branch
- Advanced merge
I have not found any substantial difference between the three options, except that “Advanced merge” gives the most flexibiity. So in its current form the first two options seem useless. Furthermore, these options appear to be very confusing.
In addition, one particularly useful option is missing: automatic (reintegrate) merge. Currently we create feature branches from e.g. the Main line, we merge revisions from the Main line to the feature branch (updates) and when we want to merge the finished feature branch back to the Main line we have to be careful to exclude revisions that are already in the Main line (because these revisions represent update merges from the Main line). This is tedious work and this procedure is unknown to many developers, often causing many conflicts. An automatic (reintegrate) merge would solve this: merge a feature branch back to the original branch excluding revisions that are already present in the original branch. This is equal to the svn 1.7 command “svn merge --reintegrate").
So I have two suggestions:
- Remove the option “Port fix”
- Change the functionality of "Merge feature branch” such that it performs and automatic (reintegrate) merge.