[svk-devel] smerge --incremental committing empty changes

[Jim Hague]

For some time now I have been using svk to keep two Subversion repositories
in sync. One is the main repository, the other a satellite on a network
only accessible via VPN. Most changes are committed to the main repository,
but circumstances dictate that some have to be committed to the satellite.
So I have mirrors of each repository and smerge between the two with the
VPN enabled as appropriate.

When smerging between the two, I prefer to use --incremental, particularly
when merging up from the satellite to the main; the Bugzilla integration
needs it.

I have found that particularly if I don't merge frequently I get trouble
if there is a merge conflict. Suppose I resolve a conflict in foo.c in favour
of the main repository; what seems to happen is that an empty change is
committed to foo.c in the main repository. When SVK moves on to consider
the next change in the satellite to be uploaded, the same conflict in
foo.c is presented, I repeat the resolve, and get another empty change
committed. After a while the change log for foo.c has a blizzard of
empty changes. Is this right/expected? Pilot error?

When this happens, I usually get out of jail by doing a non-incremental
merge, which does what I expect.

I must admit that I'm also slightly confused by the 'yours' and 'theirs'
terminology. Am I right in thinking if I am running

	svk smerge -I //mirror/reposA //mirror/reposB

that 'yours' refers to the contents of reposA and 'theirs' is reposB?
If so, what is 'Original' when I diff?

As you can tell, I'm not really sure what is going on in an smerge.
Can anyone point me at an explanation of the smerge?  I've been
Googling 'star merge' without success so far.
-- 
Jim Hague - jim at bear-cave.org.uk          Never trust a computer you can't lift.