Subversion and branching after a merge to trunk

I have 开发者_开发问答three branches Trunk Trunk.Dev Trunk.Experiment

Trunk.Dev was branched from Trunk. Trunk.Experiment was branched from Trunk.Dev

I want to reintegrate Trunk.Dev back in with Trunk. Then delete Trunk.Dev branch.

Later I want to merge Trunk.Experiment with Trunk.

Is this possible? Can Trunk.Experiment only merge with Trunk.Dev? What is the best way to accomplish what I am going for?

You can do all of the above, and it is all possible. The only issue you will likely run into is if you merge trunk.experiment into trunk, and then merge in trunk.dev. In the worst case, you will have to resolve a bunch of merge conflicts, but chances are you will be fine.

The best way to accomplish a branched development model, since you asked and that seems to be what you are going for, would be to switch to a different version control system that handles branching better, such as Git or Mercurial (my personal preference). These systems are built around branching and behave much better when branching and merging.

What you are going to do is a valid use subversion branching/merging use case (assuming you're following the procedure symbolically described below).

svn copy .../trunk .../trunk_dev
...
svn copy .../trunk_dev .../trunk_experimental
...
cd .../trunk_dev; svn merge .../trunk
cd .../trunk; svn merge --reintegrate .../trunk_dev
...
cd .../trunk_experimental; svn merge .../trunk
cd .../trunk; svn merge --reintegrate .../trunk_experimental