What, on the earth, is Property Modified? [duplicate]

This question already has answers here: 开发者_StackOverflow社区 Closed 12 years ago.

Possible Duplicates:

tortoise svn always merging 45 extra files

SVN Mergeinfo properties on paths other than the Working Copy root

Background:

I created a branch from trunk called release-v1.0. Then I continued work on trunk. After I updated and committed one file in trunk and I did a merge for that change only from trunk to release-v1.0 branch using Tortoise SVN.

I was expecting the Commit window only contained one file. But there were 28 files and folders modified. 27 out of 28 were property Modified. 1 out 28 was the file I expected with Text Modified. The files and folders with Property Modified seemed had no relationship to my file at all.

Why did Tortoise SVN touch so many folders and files which were not related to my file? This is really distractive.

My collegue told me that he was using Beyond Compare directly, because he couldn't understand Tortoise SVN. I am not sure that's the best way either.

EDIT Question: Is there a way to stop Property Modified from happening?

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You don't want to stop "Property Modified" from happening. If you do a "diff" of your tree and double-click on each file that is listed as "Property Modified", you should see the details about the metadata properties that were changed. When you do a merge, the mergeinfo property gets added to files and folders so that Subversion can keep track of which revisions were merged into which copy and at what time. Without this information, merging and viewing the history of branched/merged files would be extremely difficult.

Are the "Property Modified" files/folders showing changes to the mergeinfo property, or something else?

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It is how the newer versions of subversion handle merges. It adds a property to the files called mergeinfo that keeps track of where it was merged from.

This can be useful in some types of complex merges, but I agree that for basic use it can be annoying.