Which changesets do you select to merge ? 56-60, right ? Well, not exactly. It depends. If you are using Subversion merge command, you will need to specify 55-60. If you are using TortoiseSVN, you will select 56-60. You should keep this in mind if you are used to TortoiseSVN and you are attempting a merge using SVN merge command. Otherwise, you will end up with a merge without change 56.

Selecting changes to merge can become non-trivial when you don’t know which changes have already been merged. However, there is good news. With subversion 1.5, when you are selecting changes from source branch to merge into a target branch, don’t do it ! Subversion 1.5 onwards has built-in merge tracking. When using TortoiseSVN, if your intention is to merge all changes, just leave the changeset selection blank. Subversion knows which ones have already been merged and which ones to merge and it does it automatically. You can also select changes that have already been merged and those will be handled (excluded) automatically too.

There is a summary of what to expect from Subversion Merge-Tracking feature here – Subversion 1.5 merge-tracking in a nutshell.

There is detailed description of Subversion Merge-Tracking here and search for ‘mergeinfo property’ in Subversion documentation.

The above screen-shot shows the changes already merged in grey. Thanks to Subversion’s mergeinfo property.

So, can I just stop worrying about changesets altogether, when merging ? There are a few caveats to how mergeinfo metadata is (and sometimes not) recorded. Read this for more information -  The Final Word on Merge Tracking.

Read about Subversion merging and branching here and TortoiseSVN merging documentation here – browse down to these sections : Reviewing the Merge Results and Merge Tracking.

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Assuming you are using TortoiseSVN, you can configure a Client-Side hook.

Here is an example – Say you want to abort commit if you have a comment in your code that starts with //Do Not Commit. You can create a PowerShell script that validates all the files in your changeset and use this script as a Client-Side pre_commit_hook in TortoiseSVN.

TortoiseSVN-Settings-HookScripts

The pre_commit_hook configuration :

Configure-Hook-Scripts

//Powershell script : pre_commit.ps1

$donotcommit = “//Do Not Commit“;

$changeset = Get-Content $args[0];

foreach($file in $changeset)
{
if( Get-Content $file | Select-String $donotcommit -quiet )
{
Write-Error “$file contains code that you are not supposed to commit. [$donotcommit]“;
exit 9;
}
}

Now, if your changeset has a file with a comment starting with //Do Not Commit and you click on OK to commit this change, the commit will be aborted with this error message -

pre_commit_hook-validation

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Various techniques to accomplish version control of database schemas have been discussed and published. Martin Fowler and Pramod Sadagale has written a comprehensive article on Evolutionary Database Design. It is a must-read for everyone involved with database development.

K. Scott Allen writes in detail about an excellent system here – Versioning Databases – Change Scripts. This approach is sufficiently light-weight (for my taste) and provides complete control over the whole process.

I am providing a free tool here that you can use to implement this system. It will even create the SchemaVersionsLog table for your database, if it doesn’t exist. If you are using this tool with MSSQL Server, you can get started with very little effort. If you are using a different DBMS, you can still use this tool. It uses NHibernate to access the SchemaVersionsLog table. So, any DBMS supported by NHibernate is acceptable, as long as it comes with a command line tool to execute the sql scripts.

Download DbUpdater here.

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