Re: Options for merging source, was: Comparing source members

Adam Glauser wrote:

"Which revision put this change into production" is much more important
to me than "on which day was this line changed". Do you have a case
where the latter is better than the former? I'm no Subversion expert,
but I _think_ it should be possible to get the first and possibly the
second from Subversion, but I don't know how easy it would be. I
haven't noticed this functionality in any of the Subversion clients I've
seen, but I've only used a couple in any serious way. Can any of the
more experienced Subversion users comment on this?

I totally agree... the change date almost becomes irrelevant (although Subversion doesn't remove it) when you are able to compare with previous versions.

When you look at a program, Subversion does not tell you "this line was modified by this release, and this other line was modified with this other release" (at least I'm not aware of anything like that). However, I have found that you rarely need something like that, because usually you don't know what lines changed, but you actually need to go the other way around: you need to know what changes (and where and when) have occurred, and Subversion excels doing this.

Subversion keeps all the history and description of every version of a program, so it is very easy to compare your source file with previous or parallel ("branched") versions of the program.