Copy subversion commit messages
I know this is not the best practice, but every time I merge a huge batch up change with the trunk (and I know my branch is up to date) I will just delete the content and then copy the contents of my branch so I don't have to understand the resolution of conflicts within an hour. The problem is, I seem to be losing my entire commit message history for each file. My branch still has the correct history of commit messages ... how can I merge them?
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You urgently need to go and read Branching and Merging . What you are doing is working against SVN, not using it.
I would not like to use this repository.
What is the best practice for such a situation?
You are pushing changes from trunk to branch as often as possible. This is also the last thing you do before reintegrating the branch changes in the torso.
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Mercurial and Git make merging easy (as described here , here, and here ). It doesn't seem like you are getting a lot of value from your repository the way you use it, so you might as well consider switching without merging like this.
Oh, and erasing the entire contents of the barrel is a bad idea. No amount of "I know, but ..." makes it better.
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