Subversion function branching requires changes from another function branch

Question

I have two branches of functions: featureA and featureB.

FeatureA is complete but not merged into trunk because it has not been verified, and we are not ready to test it yet.

I am working on featureB and realized that I need a change made to featureA.

What is the best approach? I think I have several options:

Option 1

Combine function A with a branch (or perhaps only specific versions if I try to get all the ones I need), and then return everything except the changes I need.

Option 2

Make changes to FeatureB (they are not too complicated this time) and deal with conflicts when featureA and featureB are combined in the same place.

In any case, the functions will be combined into a candidate branch for the release, ready for testing and deployment. Once this RC branch is confirmed to be verified, it will be merged into the trunk at a time.

Answer 1

There is a third option:

You can cherry-pick what you want to combine and combine just that. Merge from featureA to featureB, but just merge the revisions you are interested in. Then arbitrarily fix any remaining issues.

In Eclipse, for example. this can be done quite conveniently because the merge dialog allows you to select the version (or range) that you want to merge. Just repeat this for all ranges of revisions that you need.

Answer 2

, svn:

/prod
   /release_20090801
   /release_20090901
/staging
/trunk
/sandbox

, . , QA, .

, A trunk, b.

Answer 3

, , , , - . B featureA . ( svn switch, .) FeatureB featureA. ( , , , .)

Of course, if B depends on A, this means that A will ultimately need to be tested and ready for release before B is completed. For me, this means that you must now merge featureA changes to featureB and run dev on featureB. You just need to make sure that since any corrections apply to featureA, they are integrated into featureB.