If you've been using Subversion (Svn) with branches and had to perform a merge, than you've already screamed in despair just like I've just done.
Svn, up to version 1.5, was unable to perform merge tracking correctly, a major functionality to everyone who has to work with several versions of the same application.
But fortunately, version 1.6 already has merge tracking working correctly.
I already had Svn 1.6 client installed, so all I need to do was upgrade the Debian server to Lenny and the manually upgrade the Svn server to version 1.6.
Everything went well, and there weren't many dependencies needed to be installed manually, so it was even easier than I expected.
Having everything in place, it was time to perform the merge. The merge consisted in including the maintenance branch into the development branch.
This was the second time this kind of merge was going to be performed. Since the previous merge was done without merge tracking, the logs and the graph was kind of useless to know the files history.
Even worst, when the merge was tested, it looked like the first merge had to be repeated. I did not understood this Svn weird behavior and found no reason for it, but there were files that were selected to be merged twice. The first merge was going to happen to the file contained up to revision 2636 and the other merge from revision 2637 up to the Head revision.
It had to be done carefully, but 8 hours later, the merge was done with no problems.
Since this merge was performed with the merge tracking functionality working, now it is possible to automatically track the file evolution. I'm hopping to have a faster, and with less stress, merge in the future.
./M6