If you want to fix Subversion merge there are two issues that have to be addressed. If you are not addressing these issues you are just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.
1. Cyclic merges (the reason we added --reintegrate). http://subversion.tigris.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=2837 This is really a core design issue in SVN that is going to be hard to work around. Kamesh explored some new merge algorithm ideas in: http://subversion.tigris.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=2897 He may or may not have been on the right track. The solution is just so complicated no one was able to really review it. Maybe a team of two or three people (so there there is peer review) starting over with the same basic idea could pull this off? This seems the only possible way to solve this with our current design. 2. Subversion does not handle move/rename well (tree conflicts) This is not just a merge issue, update/switch are also impacted by this problem. I do not know what the current state of the art thinking is on this problem. Can we auto-resolve tree conflicts at some point? When this problem was first approached (before we came up with tree conflicts) it hit a brick wall where it seemed a new repository design was needed: http://subversion.tigris.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=898 Fix these two problems without killing performance and we would have solved the problem. The syntactic sugar type changes could come later or on the side. But I see little real benefit in any of those proposals without a plan and roadmap to address these two items. Mark
