I believe that one of the reasons people sometimes ask for blocking items in the Subversion repository is because they have DFM Delphi stored in binary, which makes commit / merge difficult.
An alternative to changing DFM, etc. for text is the use of Scooter Software Beyond Compare.
Beyond Compare is written in Delphi and initially knows how to read binary DFMs. This means that then it becomes less of a problem (or even not) whether your DFMs are saved in Subversion in binary or text format. Beyond Compare V3 also makes 3-way merge, which makes it very easy to merge multiple commits, etc. Even ignoring the possibility of distinguishing between binary DFMs, it is still much better than TortoiseSVN. I can highly recommend it and it is very inexpensive.
Currently, the only thing I have blocked in our repository is libraries like COM (* .tlb and related _TLB.pas files).
Conor boyd
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