Subversion 1.5 brings merge improvements & more

My shop has been using Subversion for a number of years.  It is a reliable tool and works well for our team.  One area that Subversion could handle better is tracking merge information.  Our team is always working on multiple feature branches and merging those changes back into the main line of development.  The current merge support works fine (most of the time), but doesn't handle complex situations well. 

Subversion 1.5 begins to improve this with "Merge tracking" support.  From the Release Notes: Merge tracking means Subversion keeps track of what changes have been merged where. This reduces the overhead involved in maintaining branches, and gives users a way to inquire what changes are merged — or are available to be merged — on different lines of development.  Subversion 1.5 adds "foundational" support for merge tracking with more improvements coming in v1.5.1 and beyond.

Besides merge tracking, they've made a number of other changes.  Here's the full list:

  • Merge tracking (foundational)
  • Sparse checkouts (via new --depth option)
  • Interactive conflict resolution
  • Changelist support
  • Relative URLs, peg revisions in svn:externals
  • Cyrus SASL support for ra_svn and svnserve
  • Improved support for large deployments on FSFS, via sharding
  • Improved FSFS optimizability, via immutable file isolation
  • WebDAV transparent write-through proxy
  • Improvements to copy and move
  • Speed improvements, cancellation response improvements
  • Easier to try experimental ra_serf DAV access module
  • API changes, improvements, and much language bindings work
  • More than 150 new bug fixes, enhancements

    • TortoiseSVN (our favorite SVN client) has also released version 1.5. We're setting up a VM to test our code base on 1.5.  Once I've given it a good test drive, I'll post more.

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