How to ignore folder during subversion merge

Question

I have a whole bunch of changes that I need to be merged in to my branch but I want to ignore a specific folder during the merge. Is it possible to do this using Subversion? If so then how can I do it?

EDIT: The folder that I want to ignore is in the repository but I don't changes to be made to this folder during the merge

Answer 1

You could do the merge as normal, then do a recursive revert (svn revert -R somefolder) on the folder where you don't want any changes before committing.

Keep in mind that this will introduce inaccuracies in the mergeinfo though. Subversion will think certain changes were merged to "somefolder" while in reality they were not. That will cause some interesting problems if you do want to merge those changes later on.

edit: note that doing a revert of somefolder will implicitly remove any pending conflicts in that folder. There's no "suffering" induced by these conflicts.

Answer 2

See this response on various ways to ignore folders/directories and their contents:

ignoring a directory named spool