Tortoise SVN merge two branches

In the From URL option, you should specify the branch to which you want to merge.

For example, assume that there are 2 branches, branch A and branch B, and you want to merge branch B to branch A.

• In TortoiseSVN, click on Merge option and then select Merge two different trees option.
• In the From URL, please mention URL of branch A and in the To URL, mention URL of branch B.

This should merge branch B to branch A without losing any files.

Reference: found this statement here

Merging in Subversion is always done locally. The branch you want to merge to should be checked out with a clean checkout. That is, it should be up to date with no local changes. You then merge the other branch into it and commit your changes.

A Merge is not a duplicate of a particular branch. Merging is usually a three way operation. You have the branch you're merging into (called yours) the branch you're merging from (called theirs), and the last common ancestor (LCA). That last one is important.

If a change took place on your branch, it's not touched during the merge process. The merge algorithm knows this because there's a difference between yours and the LCA. If there is difference between the LCA and theirs, that's considered for a change.

If I understand you have:

• branch1 was taken from trunk.
• branch2 was taken from branch1.

What are you trying to merge? Do you want to merge both branch1 and branch2 into trunk. This should be possible if you copied trunk into branch1 through Subversion and copied branch1 into branch2 through Subversion. This way, Subversion knows that the two branches are related in their history.

If you created the branch, used Windows to copy the files, and added the files, you have no history between the two branches, and merging is more difficult.

Is it okay to merge the changes of branch2 into branch1? If so, I'd do something like this:

• Checkout branch2
• Merge branch1 into branch2 and commit those changes. branch2 will have all the changes in branch1.
• Checkout trunk
• Merge branch2 into trunk. Trunk will now have all the changes in both branch1 and branch2.