Replacing the trunk of a Subversion repository with a feature branch

For the Sicirec website, I use Subversion to track all changes. When working on big changes which take more than a day to implement, I follow the Feature Branches branching pattern. This pattern means that the trunk remains relatively stable and usable for everyday updates while I can climb in a feature branch whenever I want to work on the big new feature(s).

Subversion’s merge tracking is non-existent. This means that, when I climb from branch to trunk and back again a lot, I have to manually keep track of all the changes in trunk/ that I merged into the branch. Every one such change, once merged, loses much of its meaningful history unless I painstakingly merge all the commit messages of the patch into the message of the commit that I do after the merge.

Today, after having maintained a branch for months to keep it somewhat in sync with an every-changing trunk, I’m at the point of having to merge the branch back into trunk. This is rather nightmarish because there are bound to be the many merge conflicts that I already suffered whenever merging changes from the trunk into the branch and then multiplied some.

To avoid torture, I decided I’d rather just replace the trunk with my feature branch. This is especially attractive because I then retain the history of the branch which is a little more useful to me than the history of the trunk.

I googled around a bit and could find one thread discussing a similar problem. The solution proposed there seemed to involve a few too many steps for my taste, so I did the following:

# From the working copy of my branch:
$ svn del file:///repos/trunk -m "Temporarily deleted trunk."
$ svn mv file:///repos/branches/my_branch file:///repos/trunk -m "Moved /branches/my_branch to /trunk"
$ svn switch file:///repos/trunk 

That worked perfectly fine. (Except that I still want automatic merge tracking, dammit!)