Enormous merge with tree conflicts -- how to speed up?

[svn User]

Hello, need some expert advice. We have a largish repo (hundreds of files). About a year ago, the main dev activity moved to a branch because the person who had done a lot of the work in trunk was gone and it was not ready to release.

Now the branch, with about a year worth of changes, needs to be reintegrated with trunk so we can pick up work there.

I started a merge of branch to trunk, listing the revision numbers of the changes over the past year, ignoring ancestry, using the force command. And it started up and appears to be working fine.

BUT. Each tree conflict takes at least 45 minutes, and sometimes hours, to resolve. This may be reasonable (we are at rev 12000) but it is miserable. A number of such changes had happened in trunk before the split, and some in the branch, so every few hours I get a popup asking how to resolve a conflict, then it goes to the next one. I started this on Thursday and by Sunday afternoon it was not even 20% through the list.

Monday morning quarterbacking aside, is there a way to bypass some of this activity manually? Can I record the deletions somewhere, or perform them by hand, or such? Or is there a better way altogether? Losing some of the history would be bearable though not desirable.

Thanks very much for any tips!

I'm using SVN and TortoiseSVN version 1.14.1.

[Daniel Sahlberg]

Have you tried to do the merge using the svn command line tool? It might be interesting to see if the problem lies within Subversion itself or in the way TortoiseSVN is using the Subversion libraries.

There was a recent disussion in the Subversion development list regarding poor performance in "diffing" large files with big chunks of similar data and small changes (XML files in that case), but I don't know if that could also apply to mergeing.

http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/subversion-dev/202106.mbox/%3CYLd3fBwm77YhVarS%40camille.stsp.name%3E

Kind regards,

Daniel Sahlberg

[svn User]

Thank you very much for the tip to use the command line interface. It didn't change the speed much, it was still taking a long time to check on each tree conflict, but I can bypass that by using "--accept postpone" and then dealing with them by hand later. Exactly what I needed.