Over the past year, there have been several discussions regarding undesirable side-effects of the currently (too) "permissive" merge mode on this list. As of today, subversion will silently discard changes (instead of signaling a conflict) under certain merging scenarios. One such problem is out-of-order merging of repeated added & deleted changes, where changes can easily be lost on the target branch despite svn:mergeinfo claiming that everything has been merged [1].
At my employer, we have a post-commit code review & approval scheme. Under this scheme, developers are free to commit to trunk. Afterwards, all changesets are reviewed and approved before being merged to a release branch containing only "approved" changes. This scheme results in a lot of out-of-order merging, since the time delay for code review and approval varies a lot. We have therefore encountered issue #4405 [1] several times the last year. I find this loss of changes rather worrying, since it happens silently without any conflict or error message. It is therefore very difficult for end users to identify this "data loss". The previously proposed solution for this problem has been to add a new "strict conflicts" merge mode. I very much like this idea, and would like it to get increased attention if possible. Could if be possible to add "strict conflicts" to the most wanted list on the Subversion roadmap webpage? Thanks in advance, Fredrik Orderud [1] http://subversion.tigris.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=4405
