Why am I getting tree conflicts in Subversion?

Question

I had a feature branch of my trunk and was merging changes from my trunk into my branch periodically and everything was working fine. Today I went to merge the branch back d

Answer 1

If you encounter tree conflicts which do not make sense because you didn't edit/delete/come anywhere near the file, there is also a good chance that there was an error in the merge command.

What can happen is that you previously already merged a bunch of the changes you are including in your current merge. For instance, in trunk someone edited a file, and then later renames it. If in your first merge you include the edit, and then in a second merge include both the edit and the rename (essentially a remove), it will also give you a tree conflict. The reason for this is that the previously merged edit then appears as your own, and thus the remove will not be performed automatically.

This can occur on 1.4 repositories at least, I'm not sure whether the mergetracking introduced in 1.5 helps here.