Subversion branching and tagging with Eclipse

Branching to complete a task outside the trunk in Eclipse

Creating the branch

• Select the trunk working copy
• Team/Branch/tag…
• Copy to URL: Use the select button if the branch already exists, otherwise specify new directory in branches
• Specify copy to be either HEAD or specific revision
• Specify message for the branch, probably task name
• When checking out a freshly created branch may have to right click a repository and select refresh before it appears

svn copy {repos source} {repos new} -m "Create message"

Checkout the branch to a fresh working copy

• Can either checkout a fresh copy or switch your current working copy to the branch
• Checkout fresh copy with New/Project…/SVN/Checkout Projects from SVN
• Switch a current working copy using Team/Switch to another branch/revision…

Merging any changes from the trunk into your branch

• Select the branch project directory
• Update to HEAD
• Team/Merge…
• Select 'Merge a range of revisions
• Merge from: /trunk
• Revisions: All eligible revisions
• Default conflict options (safest)
• Any conflicts are flagged and should be dealt with manually
• Commit

Command line version is a bit more tricky, the revisions to merge must be found manually

#move to the trunk working copy

cd

#if a trunk working copy is not handy switch the old branch copy to the trunk

svn switch

#find the revision range of the branch

svn log  --stop-on-copy

#note the revisions in that branch

svn merge -r(first revision):(last revision)

#commit

svn commit -m "Branch x merged into trunk"

 

Branch task completed, merging branch back into the trunk

• Select the trunk project directory
• Update to HEAD
• Team/Merge…
• Select 'Reintegrate a branch
• Here may get an error if the trunk hasn't been updated. Update to HEAD
• Merge from:
• Default conflict options (safest)
• Any conflicts are flagged and should be dealt with manually
• Commit

svn merge --reintegrate {repo url} /path/to/local/copy

 

Tagging a release in Eclipse

All final releases are tagged with name

All release candidates are tagged with name _rc

• Select the trunk project directory
• Team/Branch/tag…
• Copy to URL: Use the select button if the tag already exists, otherwise specify new directory in tags
• Specify copy to be either HEAD or specific revision
• Specify message for the tag, probably version of release
• When checking out a freshly created tag may have to right click a repository and select refresh

copy -rHEAD http://87.102.101.70/svn/test/trunk http://87.102.101.70/svn/test/tags/release1b