What is everyone's opinion on the difference in ease of merging between Subversion 1.5.6 and 1.6.3?

Question

We're thinking of upgrading to the latest version of Subversion. Does it really make merges easier? And how painful is the upgrade process?

Answer 1

Have you read the 1.6 release notes?

The upgrade is truly painless, mainly because of this note:

There is no need to dump and reload your repositories. Subversion 1.6 can read repositories created by earlier versions. To upgrade an existing installation, just install the newest libraries and binaries on top of the older ones.

Now, once you've overwritten the binaries, you can upgrade the repo format to 1.6 to take advantage of the new features (or you'll still just have the old 1.5 features). To do this run svnadmin upgrade on it. It takes a second or two (on my 12Gb repo) and then you're good to go. You can upgrade the client easily or stick with older ones - be aware that new clients will upgrade the WC automatically and silently, so you cannot mix n match client versions with the same WC (ie if you upgrade Tortoise, you have to upgrade Ankh as well)

1.6 has 2 features for the server - tree conflict detection, and FSFS packing. I recommend the packing (run svnadmin pack to get it to combine 1000 revision files into 1 file, this does take a little time, but you can continue working while its packing).

The upgrade process was really easy, 10/10 to the svn guys for a top quality upgrade path.

Answer 2

Most of the merging improvements between svn 1.5.x and 1.6.x (like better handling of tree conflicts) were done on the client side.

So if you only care about merging improvements, you can upgrade your svn client to 1.6.x and keep using the 1.5.x server. We do the same and have not encountered any compatibility issues.

Answer 3

I just did this (well, nearly this), it was pretty painless really.

If you have really big repositories it will take quite a while to dump and load, but apart from that I had no problems at all.