I've been doing a bit of remedial work on the SDO trunk in the last few days; picking out valuable edits from the 1.1 and 1.1.1 branches and tags that had not made it to the trunk. Some of these edits went back to March of this year, so in that time the trunk had altered, making the picture quite confusing at times.
I used the svn merge command to apply the edits to the trunk, which makes the task reasonably simple. If the trunk has been altered significantly in the same area of the code then the svn merge command might present you with some conflicts to resolve, but if done promptly at the time of making the branch edit, then the likelihood of having any conflicts to resolve is low. I updated the "Making Releases" wiki page [1] to point this out to release managers, and included a note on how to do this since it is often they who are making edits in a branch or tag. However, I think it's worth just raising everyone's awareness as to how much pain this can cause if left undone for a period of time. Kelvin. [1] http://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/TUSCANY/Making%20releases
