As I’ve mentioned in other posts, the Subversion project is on the verge of releasing version 1.5, a culmination of nearly two years of work. The release is jam-packed with some huge new features, but the one everyone’s excited about is “merge tracking”.

Merge-tracking is when your version control system keeps track of how lines of development (branches) diverge and re-form together. Historically, open source tools such as CVS and Subversion haven’t done this at all; they’ve relied on “advanced” users carefully examining history and typing arcane commands with just the right arguments. Branching and merging is possible, but it sure ain’t easy. Of course, distributed version control systems have now started to remove the fear and paranoia around branching and merging—they’re actually designed around merging as a core competency. While Subversion 1.5 doesn’t make it merging as easy as a system like Git or Mercurial, it certainly solves common points of pain. As a famous quote goes, “it makes easy things easy, and hard things possible.” Subversion is now beginning to match features in larger, commercial tools such as Clearcase and Perforce.

My collaborators and I are gearing up to release a 2nd Edition of the free online Subversion book soon (and you should be able to buy it from O’Reilly in hardcopy this summer.) If you want gritty details about how merging works, you can glance over Chapter 4 right now, but I thought a “nutshell” summary would make a great short blog post, just to show people how easy the common case now is.

Make a branch for your experimental work:



$ svn cp trunkURL branchURL

$ svn switch branchURL Work on the branch for a while:



# ...edit files

$ svn commit

# ...edit files

$ svn commit Sync your branch with the trunk, so it doesn’t fall behind:



$ svn merge trunkURL

--- Merging r3452 through r3580 into '.':

U button.c

U integer.c

... $ svn commit Repeat the prior two steps until you’re done coding. Merge your branch back into the trunk:



$ svn switch trunkURL

$ svn merge --reintegrate branchURL

--- Merging differences between repository URLs into '.':

U button.c

U integer.c

... $ svn commit

Go have a beer, and live in fear of feature branches no more.

Notice how I never had to type a single revision number in my example: Subversion 1.5 knows when the branch was created, which changes need to be synced from branch to trunk, and which changes need to be merged back into the trunk when I’m done. It’s all magic now. This is how it should have been in the first place. 🙂

Subversion 1.5 isn’t officially released yet, but we’re looking for people to test one of our final release candidate source tarballs. CollabNet has also created some nice binary packages for testing, as part of their early adopter program. Try it out and report any bugs!